The Patissier's Chronicle

For a start, it is not our business mission to piss off customer. Else we will already be out of business by now. And more often than not, we will try to accommodate customers' requests as best we can. Our regular customers will probably attest to this. However, we are also quite the stickler when comes to business policy. The imposition of an admin fee for change requests after an order is made is one example. We do know of cake shops that will absolutely not entertain changes or cancellations once the order is placed. For us, all change requests within 24 hours after an order is placed will be made without charge. An admin charge of $10.70 will apply for all such requests made after the 24 hour period. Our policy is clearly communicated on the main page of our website, i.e. prior to customer placing an order. The policy is also reflected on the order confirmation that customer will receive after an order is placed. However, we can only do so much in terms of communication. Whethe...

Our Chefs create between 3 to 5 new cake recipes every year. And one of these new cakes is specially created to celebrate our nation's birthday. For National Day, our chefs will typically "go local", i.e. come up with a cake that incorporates local flavors. This may be through the use of ingredients that Singaporeans can closely associate with. Our Ribena, Holicks and Milo Dinosaur cakes are representation of such. We have also created cakes that are interpretation of local dessert and even food. Our OrNee cake is a good example of this, while our Laksa cake is an even bolder attempt to transform the taste of a popular local food fare into cake flavor.  We take a lot of pride in developing our new recipes and will not launch a new cake until we are sufficiently confident that it will go well with our customers. And several of our previous National Day cakes (e.g. The Ribena, Ho-Ho-Horlicks) had received such good reviews that they have been rostered into our rotational ca...

We have multiple avenues for customers to make payment for their cakes these days. This includes PayNow, where we will provide our UEN# for customers to make the necessary transfer to our bank account. And this is increasingly becoming one of the most popular mode of payment for us. So imagine our surprise when we woke up this morning to find a payment of $5,564 received overnight for a cake order. Yes, our cakes are not known to be cheap. And a fact that we readily acknowledged. But they are not that expensive either! Apparently the customer had ordered a 500g cake with customized message. Instead of $55.64, she had transferred 100x the amount to us. We immediately did the right thing of course. Contacted the customer to inform her of the error and that we will refund the balance (excess) amount back to her this morning. From her "oh my goodness" reply, we reckoned she was still unaware that she had possibly paid for the most expensive 500g cake in the world!    We may all l...

So, we are back to where we were in May 16 this year. Then again, it was really a matter of WHEN and not IF, after the explosion in number of new Covid-19 infections with the KVT and then Jurong Fishery Port clusters. When we first heard the news at around 3pm on 20 July, we braced ourselves for the phones to ring off their hooks. And as expected they did. In just a matter of minutes actually. What was till then a rather uneventful day became a frantic 2 hours (till closing time) where we were flooded with calls/emails to cancel orders, downsize cakes, change collection/delivery dates etc. etc. But having experienced quite a few of such "disruptions" over the past year, we have become quite experienced (and immune) in dealing with the situation. We even have a "SOP" in place to cater for Heighten Alert.  We typically charge an admin fee for change request made after 24 hours of order placement. But we have waived the fee for orders affected by the current phase 2HA....

Blogger is typically the de-facto platform for those who first started blogging. At least back in our days. It is a user-friendly platform (almost idiot-proof even) that allows for even the most novice of novices to quickly get their blogs up and running. However, this is not the most sophisticated of blogging platforms, compared to say, Wordpress (are you listening, Bigman@Blogger?!). And in recent times, some features have been pulled or no longer supported, which can be a real pain. The latest casualty is FollowByEmail, which will no longer be available from this month. This raises the question: Since we are bwitching so much, why do we continue to stick with Blogger when we restarted our blog? Familiarity is the primary reason. You probably have heard the one about old dogs and new tricks. And believe us when we said we did try to get ourselves on Wordpress. We gave up after 15 minutes, which was about the time we took to design this blog, as we were still unable to get pass the Wo...

  No, The Patissier have not started selling pies. We used to feature unique (to us anyway) pastry shops that we came across during our travels on our Facebook page. Covid-19 has put paid to those travels for now. But in support of local F&B, we like to write about some of the interesting/delicious food from local food establishments and home bakers that we have come across. Hopefully, this will generate some interests from our blog readers to try them out as well. First off, pies. Ma Baker is a whole-of-family home bake started by an ex-schoolmate. The venture is only a couple of months old but have received rave reviews from customers who had tasted their pies. We decided to order some over the weekend for our staff, as well as to bring home to the family. There are quite a few selections when comes to flavours. All comes with quaint names. You can opt for “This little piggy went to the pie” (pork), “Mary HAD a little lamb” (mutton) and “Chicken not so little” (chicken). ...

We are all human. Thus we are not infallible. Same goes for all of us at The Patissier.  So we forgot to put in an order for a customer who is supposed to collect her cake today. And the customer happened to be the owner's mom. But luckily the order was taken by the owner himself. So nobody in the shop got fired (Just kidding. We hardly fire anyone. Except on 2 occasions in recent memory. But that's a story for another time). And as with everything under Sod's Law, the guilty party (aka Owner) was not in the shop when his mom came to collect her cake. So a slight commotion ensued that involved first trying desperately to find the order, then attempting to call the Owner multiple times and failing because, as luck would have it, he was driving and wasn't on handsfree. To make things worse, we do not have the same cake over the counter today. But the story did have a happy ending this time. The Owner's mom is not the sort to make a fuss. And our staff was able to chur...

  New product development process takes time. And especially with our chefs, the quest for excellence means that they start to work on a new recipe months before the targeted launch date. Take this year’s mid-Autumn festival as an example; we had already launched our Moon (Mousse) Cakes last year. However, our chefs were convinced that the product can be improved further. So they started working on this year’s version in July – some 2 months before our targeted launch date. The process involved trial production, taste test, tweaking of recipe… and this is put on repeat until we are certain that the final recipe is ready for launch. We do create new recipes for special occasions every year. And for some of these new “occasion cakes”, we may not make many for sale. But regardless of quantity, all cakes that come from The Patissier must meet our strict quality standards (both in terms of look and taste) before they are put out for sale.  

As expected, the bulk of our customers are Singaporean. While we always have customers from within SE Asia (especially Indonesian, Thai & Malaysian living here), our "outside of SE Asia" foreign contingent of customers have also been increasing with time. When we first started in 2000 and until about the mid-2010, the largest group of such foreign customers were Japanese expatriates living in Singapore.  And through our involvement with the "Voilah! French Festival in Singapore" during 2016-17, we started seeing more French nationals coming to buy cakes from our shop. Then the number of mainland Chinese customers started increasing (as more of them started residing in our city state), followed by Korean customers. When we launched our Taipei popup store in 2017 and subsequently opened our very first overseas flagship store in the Taiwanese city in 2019, we started getting more Taiwanese customers (those living/working in Singapore as well as tourists) coming to ...

  This was first posted on our Facebook page in May 2020. We have updated and reposted here as it continues to be relevant. We charge $21.40 for delivery. Sometimes more for certain locations. We know this is not cheap. Then again, our delivery fee isn’t the most expensive either. The fee that customers pay goes towards maintaining our dedicated delivery fleet and personnel. And we are committed to delivering your cake orders within the time period that we promise to deliver. Our delivery personnel are also trained to ensure that your cake is delivered to you in the most optimal condition. If the integrity of your cake is compromised for whatever reason when we deliver it to you, we will provide you with a replacement cake or a full refund. Our delivery timing is between 9am – 5pm. Given the a large number of cake orders we received these days are for delivery, we typically cannot commit to a narrower delivery window. This is because we need to optimize our delivery schedule in ord...

  We do get the occasional feedback from customers saying that the texture of our cake is not as “crispy” or “smooth” as compared to the last one they had. While our chefs will follow strictly to the (standard) recipe of each cake during production, our cakes are all handcrafted and made in small batches to ensure freshness.   Unlike in a mechanized process, where all ingredients may be calculated to the nearest milligram and the machine takes care of the mass production, our cakes are made 100% by human from start to finish. As such, there is definitely a degree of variability when comes to different batches of the same cake that we make. We are not implying that it is okay for the texture and taste of two different batches of the same cake to come out substantially different. This is definitely unacceptable. But we may not, for example, be able to account for why one cake seems somewhat crisper/smoother in texture than another purchased one week after the first one.  We...

  We get tagged quite regularly by customers who post complimentary photos about our cakes. And this is the main motivation for us to keep going and always strive to do better. Sales is important, of course. We be lying if we say we aren’t doing this for the money. But we believe that if we continue to provide products that customers will rave about, the money will take care of itself.  A tad corny, but true. Quality is the reason why we do not increase the production of our Meringue beyond our current daily maximum production. It is also why we will rather reject a customized cake order if we feel that the dateline is too tight for us to do a good job. Then again, we are not without failings.   We do get negative feedbacks at times, although this is very much the exception rather than norm. And we treat all negative feedbacks very seriously. If possible, we will attempt to recreate the issue that customer has mentioned to investigate what might have caused it, before p...

  Our car radio is typically tuned to UFM100.3 in the morning. While driving to work today, we heard one of the winning entries for their "Script It Right" Chinese Radio Drama Script Writing Competition ( "与声剧来"中文广播剧创作比赛) . The title of the script is “ 出路 “ (literally translated as “Way Out”) and revolved around a conversation between an elderly couple manning a chicken rice stall. The husband was adamant about sticking to the old ways of doing business and had refused to adopt new modes like delivery platform or cashless payment. This was despite a drastic drop in his business compared to his competitor who had evolved with time. He was insistent that, with an established brand name and good quality product, customers will continue to patronize without him having to resort to what he termed as “frills” to support his business.  The story reminded us of our own business evolution journey. It was not so long ago when we only had 3 main modes of payment at the shop,...

The Patissier is probably the first in Singapore to introduce and popularize the Croquembouche as a celebration cake locally. But unlike the traditional Croquembouche where the profiteroles are typically coated in caramel or spun sugar, our versions are coated in chocolate so as to better adapt to the hot/humid environment. The Croquembouche dates back to 1700 and may be attributed to the great French Pastry Chef Antonie Careme. It is a traditional French festive cake (for weddings, baptismals, 1st communions, etc.), made of profiteroles (cream puffs) filled with pastry or whipped cream (Creme Chantilly) that are formed into a pyramid/cone shape by being "glued" together with caramel, drizzled with more caramel, and decorated with sugared Almonds, Hazelnuts, chocolate or ribbons. ⁣ T he cake had it's origin in the fanciful, edible architectural structures prepared for French Royalty and Nobility called Pieces Montees. French Pastry Chef, Antoine Careme (1784-1833), made ...