The Patissier's Chronicle

  We provide delivery options for our cakes. But at $21.40, we readily admit that our delivery charge is not cheap.   So we have no objection if customers want to arrange for third-party couriers (Grab, Deliveroo etc.) to pick up their cakes on their behalf.   We typically get 2 to 3 of such pickups a day.   And we have encountered some rather interesting situations with third-party couriers:            Many a time we get couriers who come to the shop with  zero collection details and expect us to know exactly which cake to give to them. When pressed for their customer’s name/contact number (for verification purpose to avoid giving the wrong cake), the reply is always “You should know which cake”. No, we do not know which cake until we can ascertain the collection details. Because we do not have just one cake order waiting to be picked up every day.        Some couriers will just barge into the shop and ignorin...

  Yes, the Mid-Autumn Festival has cometh upon us again.  Also known as the “Mooncake Festival”, ‘tis the day (night rather) where people will gather to gaze at the full moon above and hoping to discover some semblance of a rabbit, a fairy-like maiden or an axe wielding dude (no, we aren’t talking about Jack Nicholson in The Shining). And one does not simply stare at the moon with an empty stomach. In places such as Taiwan, for example, barbecue parties are a standard fare during the Mid-Autumn Festival. But celebrations are probably much subdued these days with the Covid-19 pandemic. Back home in Singapore, the SOP is typically a combination of mooncakes – round-shaped pastries that symbolize the moon – and Chinese tea, which are consumed as dessert after dinner. The mooncakes have also evolved over the years. Apart from the traditional recipe (a rich thick filling usually made from red bean/lotus seed paste and surrounded by a thin crust)  that has been passed down f...

  For our upcoming marketing campaign for our Taipei store, we wish to provide consumers in Taiwan with a better insight on the history of The Patissier. So we had spent the past few days gathering photos that chronicle from how it all began to where we are now.  Shopfront - Present The Patissier has truly transformed over the past 21 years. From our humble beginning at Ann Siang Hill manned by 3 staff, we have since grown to a Company that employs 20 people. And with the need of a much bigger kitchen as our business grew, we have also relocated to Mohd Sultan Road and have been operating at the present location for the past 13 or so years. The look and feel of the shop had gone through a couple of transformations as well. So has the look of some of our cakes. But certain aspects of our business have remained very much the same: the passion and creativity of our team of chefs in coming up with new and exciting flavors to continue pleasing our customers; and the quality of th...

Today marks the official launch of our revamped The Patissier in Taiwan website. There are two reasons why we decided to embark on the change The original website was created when we first started our Taipei flagship store in 2019 and mirrored our old website for Singapore. And frankly, the overall look and feel of the website was a tad dated. The other impetus for the makeover was because the online purchase function for our Taipei store went kaput during the earlier part of this year. This was because the payment gateway provider that we were using previously decided to pull out of Taiwan, which left us stranded with no online payment option. Our first intention was to get a third party to design a new website for us. Although the author is not an IT idiot (he’s actually quite savvy compared to the average Singaporean), we reckoned that this will save us a lot of trouble and pain. But when we were quoted almost S$30K for the job, the boss said to him “why don’t you look at Shopify...

The “Hungry Ghost Festival” falls on the lunar seventh month of each year. Today marks the final day of this year’s festival. For the uninitiated, the Hungry Ghost Festival is the Chinese equivalent of Halloween. And the visitsingapore.com website provides a good account of the festival, which we paraphrase below: “Also known as Zhong Yuan Jie （中元节）in Chinese, it a festival held in honor of the dearly departed. According to traditional customs, the souls of the dead are permitted to roam the earth during the festival, and these ghosts can get up to mischief if ignored. To prevent this, all sorts of offerings are made during this period, which is the seventh month in the lunar calendar. Food offerings as well as stacks of hell money and paper offerings, such as cars, watches and jewelry, are burned by relatives to appease their deceased family members—taking care of their material needs even in the afterlife. And as if satisfying the ghosts’ appetites for money and food wasn’t e...