The Patissier's Chronicle

  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...

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...

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...

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...

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...