Sweet success: Online bakeries set up physical shops

Cookies make for a great treat, a moreish snack, and a sweet dessert. And occasionally, it can also function as a remedy for heartbreak, or a perk-me-up during troubling times. Two friends, Grace Kim and Kirsty Tsang, first stumbled upon the restorative powers of cookies when going through a tough period in their lives: Grace had lost her job as a result of the pandemic, and Kirsty was nursing a broken heart. “One evening, the both of us sat at our dining room table eating an entire batch – and we realised that cookies were the answers to our woes,” says Kirsty. 

The pair immediately got to work. They started an online bakery, Guilt, at the start of 2020 as a platform to share their therapeutic bakes with others. “I don’t think I know a single person who doesn’t like cookies,” adds the co-founder. 

It helps that the cookies come stuffed with a variety of flavour combinations – both classic and novel. Each is a labour of love; a personal reflection of either Grace’s or Kirsty’s memory. “Every cookie is a snapshot from a part of our lives,” says Kirsty.

The cheekily named Tinder Surprise is an ode to their dating app misadventures, where underneath a plain-looking vanilla chocolate chip cookie hides a chocolate fudge brownie middle. Then there’s the popular s’mores-inspired Walk Of Shame, a homage to the many camping trips the childhood friends used to embark on when growing up in Canada. Other highlights include the earl grey-base Fifty Shades Of Grey; and Sugar Daddy, which reimagines old fashioned cocktail into a spiced brown butter sugar cookie glazed with aged whiskey and finished with a sprinkling of smoked sea salt. 

The results were a hit. Revenue nearly doubled, according to Kirsty, buoyed by a surge in demand during the stay-home period. Opening a physical store was only a natural extension for the two. “Seeing and smelling freshly baked cookies is all part of the experience,” she adds. 

The first-time business owners started looking for a space, and had to quickly learn how to navigate the rules and regulations of the food and beverage industry. “I think when you’re starting a business, budget is always the first thing to go out of the window,” says Kirsty. “But if you’re creative and resourceful, it’s actually not as difficult as it seems.” 

Now, with a store at Arab Street they can call their own, Grace and Kirsty are most excited about finally meeting their customers. What used to be just online messages and comments are now replaced with intimate, physical conversations.

And more importantly, it allows for Guilt to tempt customers through scents of freshly baked batches. Kirsty explains: “As appealing as photos might look online, nothing can replace seeing the cookie in person and getting one fresh out of the oven.”

Sometimes, you might find loaves of crusty sourdough bread on display. On other days, the shelves might come lined with classic banana cake, scented with gula Melaka. This interesting mix of modern bakes and traditional treats can be found at Puffs and Peaks, a home business turned neighbourhood bakery run by a mother-daughter duo. 

But doughnut is the marquee item, whether filled with sweet taro paste, or laced with chocolate passionfruit. “For all our fillings, we make sure that we make it by hand,” says founder Ong Jing Ting. “So nothing that is out of a bottle, or that comes pre-flavoured.” 

Everything at this family-run bakery is made from scratch, without the use of colouring or preservatives. As Jing Ting puts it, she uses “a lot of good ingredients”, from premium chocolates to Australian wheat flour – but this wasn’t always the case when the young baker first started. 

Back in school, Jing Ting started Puffs and Peaks as an online platform to document her baking journey, as well as to sell her warm treats to friends and classmates. “I used to produce birthday cakes with lots of colouring,” the young baker recalls. Her passion for working with the oven spurred her to take up a job at a bakery in Melbourne. And it was there where she realised “how good things can taste without any preservatives”. Inspired, she brought back what she learned and applied it to her own creations: to focus “less on how things look, but more on the flavour”. 

Along the way, her mother was retrenched, and decided to help out at Puffs and Peaks. So while Jing Ting experimented with starters and bread making, her mother dug into her recipe book to bake up traditional treats of kueh lapis and ang ku kueh coloured with natural dyes. They even combined their approach to switch up the classic banana cake; sugar is swapped for gula Melaka to lend a richer, caramel-like flavour. 

The turning point of the digital business came when people were stuck at home, and demand for their bakes, particularly doughnuts, boomed. “We could no longer bake from home,” says Jing Ting. “Capacity-wise, it was very hard to satisfy the demand.” As chance would have it, the mother and daughter found a vacant unit at Tampines Central Community Complex – a humble shop that can house larger-scale equipment and provide a sit-in area for customers to enjoy some freshly made treats. 

Production can now be doubled, and Jing Ting even has the professional oven needed to pursue her love for baking bread. Beyond doughnuts, there’s room on the counter to retail sourdough loaves, brioche, baguettes, and more. “These are the things that really sparked my interest [in baking] in the first place,” says Jing Ting. What she enjoys most, however, is the fact that she no longer needs to work out of her house. “It’s nice to be able to come home to home and have a separation between the two,” she adds. 

Still, the quaint space of Puffs and Peaks feels warm and homely. It’s a cosy space designed with a simple approach: furniture is all secondhand, sourced by Jing Ting; the shelvings are put up by her father; and decorations of potted plants are brought in from her room. Jing Ting says: “We wanted to make this a humble space where the focus is on the food.”

The inspiration behind this unassuming bakery is simple: two friends decided to turn their sweet love for baking into a reality. Having run successful home-based bakeries respectively, Sheryl Tan and Maisie Chew decided to come together and work on their common dream – of opening a dessert shop. “We wanted to bring more joy and warmth in the whole baking process, instead of being just a backend baker,” says Sheryl. 

To that end, with their 15-seater café, the pair can now provide an expanded menu and a more intimate service – things that Simple Café previously couldn’t achieve when operating out of a cloud kitchen. “Previously due to transportation issues, we could really sell chilled items,” shares Maisie. Now, sitting within the minimalist space is a cake fridge, which displays an unfussy selection of chilled cakes and pastries. 

Signature creations include the Mont Blanc, a light treat suffused with sweetness from chestnut cream and mascarpone chestnut; or the Bassion Tart with tropical flavours of passionfruit and banana compote. Sheryl and Maisie can serve, and plate, these handcrafted treats personally, and “in the best way possible” – an advantage that comes with having a physical storefront. “We can now provide a whole experience to our customers, including drink-pairing recommendations,” adds Sheryl.

But being store owners come with a new set of playbook, as the duo quickly realised. As it turns out, time is a crucial ingredient required to keep things running smoothly. “Being online-based, work was flexible and we could plan everything according to our schedules,” Maisie explains. “But when you open a store you have to devote 24/7 of your time to it, regardless if there are any customers.”

It might be a tough transition, going from online to offline, but Sheryl and Maisie are enjoying the new challenges and customers that Simple Café now brings. Sheryl says: “The journey of seeing all these becoming a reality just made us love what we do even more.”