Badminton coach sells nostalgic retro buttercream cakes baked with 30-year-old recipe
Like many millennials who run home-based baking businesses, 34-year-old freelance badminton coach Joy Lim used to sell typical sweets like cupcakes. But these days, she specialises in less common old-fashioned Chinese bakery-style buttercream cakes. The humble, cheerful sheet cakes were especially popular in the late ’70s and ’80s. They came in simple flavours like strawberry, chocolate and were sliced into rectangles, then piped with riotously colourful buttercream frosting. The retro sponges found in mom-and-pop HDB bakeries were often baked with no-frills ingredients and were thus affordable. They were a popular comforting treat.
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While they’re no longer as ubiquitous, you can still find them in some shops these days (Love Confectionery in Bukit Merah is an example). Boomers are likely to be more familiar with these cakes, while older millennials and Gen-Xers may fondly recall tucking into a piece or two as kids.
Joy’s home-based baking biz, Joy Bakes With Sydney (Sydney is her five-year-old daughter), sells a box of 12 assorted slices for $24, or six for $15.
Uses thirty-year-old recipe from baking instructor godma
Joy’s baking expertise and 30-year-old cake recipe come from her godmother Bong Hiong Hwa, 64, a veteran baker. Hiong Hwa runs a baking school called Jia Lei Confectionery & Training Centre, where Joy first met her 12 years ago. Back when Joy attended her classes, Hiong Hwa’s school was located at Queen Street, but the baker now holds weekly classes from her HDB flat.
Hiong Hwa and Joy
“Hiong Hwa liked the fact that I went to learn how to make traditional cakes — she felt that it was difficult to find young people interested in making them nowadays,” Joy says, adding that most of Hiong Hwa’s students were in their fifties or older. As Joy attended more classes, the duo’s mother-daughter relationship was forged. Joy explains: “Hiong Hwa isn’t married and doesn’t have kids”.
Started baking biz during pandemic
Currently, the millennial mother of two girls bakes the buttercream cakes together with Hiong Hwa. Joy says her godmother is simply there to help her grow her business and doesn’t have a share in it.
Joy started her home-based biz in 2019, when she had to temporarily halt her badminton classes due to the pandemic. She has since resumed coaching, but her bakeshop is still quite popular, selling an average of 80 boxes of cakes per month even though Joy only takes orders once monthly.
Her customers range from those in their twenties to seniors in their sixties. Some of her badminton students’ (who are in primary school) parents also order her cakes.
Retro cakes come in four flavours
She offers four flavours: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and pandan. Each box comes with a mix of all of them, as pictured above. The designs are simple but pretty and charming, with more pleasing pastel notes than the garish hues sometimes seen in neighborhood bakeries’ versions.
Most pieces are rectangular, topped with buttercream and homemade jam, but there are also a few triangular slices of chocolate and vanilla cakes, covered with peanuts and chocolate sprinkles.
If you want a box of just one flavour, you’ll have to make a minimum purchase of two boxes.
Customers say her retro cakes taste different from those from brick and mortar shops
According to Joy, what sets her cakes apart are the ingredients she uses, plus the years of experience Hiong Hwa has. “I’m not sure what heartland shops usually use,” she says, “but maybe they don’t use enough butter for example, and their cakes aren’t very fluffy”.
The duo use arguably better quality ingredients, such as Taiwanese cake flour to make their butter-based sponge cakes, and New Zealand Golden Churn butter for their buttercream.
Joy shares they “use traditional methods” to bake, saying “we still use our hands [for certain parts of the baking process], instead of making it purely with machines”. Hiong Hwa’s long-time assistant also assists: she does most of the neat piping on the cakes for sale.
While 8days.sg hasn't tried Joy’s bakes yet, she says “the general feedback from my customers is that my [old-school] cakes are not too sweet and the texture just right - soft and fluffy, which they can’t really find elsewhere”.
Joy with daughter Sydney back in 2019.
Why not sell her cakes more than once a month?
Unless there’s very high demand in a particular month, Joy usually only takes orders for her cakes once a month (often on the first Thursday of each month), with no minimum order per customer. However, she usually limits herself to 80 boxes in total per month. After all, she has to devote most of her time to badminton coaching ’cos she says while the cake biz is “profitable”, it doesn’t earn her enough to qualify as a full-time job.
Between coaching and baking, Joy says both are equally challenging. “Both are [jobs done] in the heat - one is near the oven and the other is in a sports hall, also very hot,” she laughs.
Her husband, who is a Singapore Airlines pilot, helps out with deliveries and packaging of cakes whenever he can.
As for whether it’s sorta ironic that a badminton coach is selling calorific cakes, Joy says jokingly: “No lah, it’s okay what - you eat already, then go play badminton and you can start burning calories again”.
Order cakes from Joy Bakes With Sydney via Facebook.
Photos: Joy Lim
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