Pastizzi are being selling like hot cakes in southern Australia... from a traditional Maltese bus.

Maltese-Australian Tanya Agius said she got the idea after finding it difficult to enjoy the popular snack whenever she returned to Adelaide from Malta.

Together with her partner, Danielle Frankish, she learnt how to make pastries and they are now sharing the pea and ricotta varieties with their fellow Australians.

Maltese-Australian Tanya Agius with a tray of pastizzi.

Ms Agius, 39, and Ms Frankish, 33, drive around selling pastizzi on their bus Archie, which is modelled on a traditional Maltese route bus.

The same way Patist in David Azzopardi’s popular song goes around with a hot trayful selling for three pennies each, Archie the pastizzi bus takes the hot pastries to the people of Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, where the Maltese community is much smaller than Melbourne and Sydney.

Ms Agius, whose father Tony was born in Malta, loves pastizzi and the two bought the bus in June 2012.

When the pastries are being served, sometimes a Maltese flag is propped up from one of the vehicle windows.

The pastizzi sold from the bus have a strong Maltese following but Australians are also becoming hooked.

“We were taught a version of the recipe from an old Maltese friend and practised until it was just right. We also sell Kinnie.

“We have strayed from the traditional and apart from ricotta and peas we do four other savoury flavours and two are sweet,” she said.

The two women also serve mushy pea and pork, chicken and mushroom, beef Vindaloo, Moroccan lamb, sweet ricotta and apple and cinnamon.

It took 12 months to replace the internal structure of the bus and repaint it. The two stripped the vehicle of its blue paint and took it to a professional sprayer for its new look. Archie was painted in orange with a white roof to look just like the old buses.

Painted on its sides in black or white are sentences explaining the way to pronounce ‘pastizzi’, what the delicacy is made of, and what it means to sell like pastizzi. One sentence reads: “In every Maltese boy and girl’s heart lies pastizzi.”