Bake King

Next stop after The Icing Room on my cake shopping day in Singapore: Gim Hin Lee (Pte.) Ltd. - "For All Your Baking & Cooking Needs"

This shop, which is the retail outlet for Bake King supplies, brought me back to my early days of baking, and reminded me of all the different local sweets I grew up eating. Next to the Wilton decorating supplies were cutters for Nonya Kuih. Alongside the mind-boggling array of fancy cupcake wrappers, were molds for mooncakes.


Left: Nonya Kuih, a distinctly Singaporean variety of brightly-colored Straits Chinese cakes, often made from glutinous rice flour and steamed, heavy with the aromas and flavor of screwpine leaves and coconut. Right: Mooncakes are a Chinese pastry with a thin skin, filled with lotus or red bean paste, sometimes with a whole duck egg yolk baked in, traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

                      

 When I asked if I could take pictures, the store owner, Vincent, kindly obliged and we struck up a conversation. I told him about how I missed the flavors of home. I told him how many of the Asian markets in the U.S., even in San Francisco, only offered a fraction of the selection of oils and essences and emulcos that now lay before me.  

When I told Vincent how I had a barely-used bottle of pandan (screwpine) essence in my pantry, he excitably grabbed a bottle of Bake King pandan essence off the shelf, unscrewed its cap, shoved it beneath my nostrils and asked, "Is it as good as this one?!" It is not!



Durians: dangerous in every way

Before I knew it, Vincent was opening a bottlle of Bake King Durian essence and waving it before me. Those of you know know about durian know where this story is going. Those of you who don't, look it up and be glad you don't have the web version of smellavision. Let's put it this way: my husband once took me to get Durian ice cream, refused to let me eat it in the car and seriously considered making me sleep in the guest room that night.



I left the Durian essence behind, and made off with only 2 relatively unexciting acquisitions: gold petal dust and a paper pop-up cake stand, which I think I may have come across online before.




Thanks to my Aunty Vini for assisting with my cake stand photo shoot.



I got home and immediately checked out the Bake King website, and they have classes as well! If I were staying longer I'd be all over the Japanese figurine class. How cute are these?! 

Bake King, I'll be back!