What twisted wizard of the patisserie conjured up the humble vanilla slice?

Outwardly, it’s a simple thing: a block of firm yet yielding custard, cradled between two layers of crunchy flake pastry, and adorned with a sticky, snowy layer of fondant.

Its subtlety is that the pastry layers form a simple press, and when pressure is applied, it discharges a dollop of cold custard into the diner’s lap or cleavage. An incautious bite unmasks the vanilla slice as an ingenious booby trap, not to be consumed by gentlemen and gentlewomen who value their dignity.

But some 3000 citizens of Ouyen and around about were less interested in decorum than in celebrating the slice for which Ouyen has been known since 1998, the inaugural year of the Great Australian Vanilla Slice Competition.

The weather was cloudy and chilly at times, then sunny and breezy, but the spring deluge predicted earlier in the week lingered over South Australia long enough to spare the Mallee town.

Young men with thick thighs bulging from lurid tights whizzed around the town’s streets on racing cycles, literally at breakneck speed, in the 30km Ouyen Criterium leg of the Tour de Murray cycle race.

The most important race for Ouyen begins in around a fortnight’s time, as local grain farmers race against time and multiple billions of voracious plague locusts to produce the biggest wheat crop in perhaps two decades – a 12-bagger, minimum, with prices heading skyward after a confluence of climate-related catastrophes in major wheat-growing nations in the northern hemisphere left silos half full.

From just south of Red Cliffs, all the way down into the Western District, the countryside is lush and green.

The mood of the throng in Ouyen’s streets yesterday was buoyant – when water flows, so does money.

The Mallee Bakery did a roaring trade in vanilla slices. Although it has yet to crack the Big One on its home turf, it makes a fine vanilla slice: $3.50 a pop, and, with rare entrepreneurship, a takeaway six-pack for only $21!