"We have to get all the different kinds of ingredients - coconut juice, coconuts, leaves, potatoes. And we have a lot of ingredients," said Mdm Soh.Īll throughout the day, the husband-wife duo busy themselves with all sorts of activities - pushing trolleys, folding dough, serving customers.
They arrive at the bakery an hour before opening and join their workers, who have already been hard at work since 7am.
Love story about a cupcake baker crack#
The bakery is open five days a week, from 10am to 8pm.īut Mdm Soh and Mr Tan's day begins hours earlier.Īt the crack of dawn, they leave their Bukit Panjang home and scour five to six markets in search of the freshest ingredients. Working in a bakery is hard work, said Mdm Soh. Often, the famous kueh dadar – rolled coconut crepe with grated coconut – and putu ayu kueh – steamed pandan sponge cake with gula melaka coconut – are sold out by noon. The line snakes past the bakery's ubiquitous yellow signboard and spills out onto the corridor. Queues sometimes form before the shop opens for the day. "I felt very happy to see the customers, (seeing) that they would support us."įast forward almost two decades, and the bakery has become an institution in the neighbourhood. "Our customers were telling their friends about us and the word spread," Mdm Soh. With the bakery also featured on a local Chinese television programme, business took off. "We liked the atmosphere here and the layout of the shop." The name Tiong Bahru was a nice sounding one," said Mdm Soh. "We thought Tiong Bahru would be a good place to set up our business. The couple decided to set up a new bakery in Tiong Bahru and strike it out on their own. "They wanted (us) to make more and use cheaper ingredients." (To focus on) quality," Mdm Soh explained. "Our thinking was to bake fresh cakes so that customers could enjoy them. Their partners wanted Mr Tan and Mdm Soh to ramp up production of their cakes and focus on quantity, similar to some other bakeries. The couple decided to name the bakery "Galicier" because it sounded like the word "delicious", said Mdm Soh.īut business disagreements emerged, she said. Business was good, and their business partners initially let them run the show. The couple worked there for about 17 years, recalled Mdm Soh.
In 1983, they finally had their own bakery. The opportunity to rent a shop at Serangoon soon came up. And when several partners came on board to invest in the business, Mdm Soh and Mr Tan took the plunge. "We thought about it for a long time but continued with our daily lives and working hard." It's hard to save that much money," Mdm Soh explained. "At that point in time, it probably needed several hundred thousand dollars to do so. "They told me that they really liked these cakes and asked why didn't I open a shop?"īut opening a bakery would mean taking huge risks. "I sold them to friends and those whom I met at the Turf Club," she recalled. To make extra cash, Mdm Soh would bake cakes after she returned home from work. "Money was a problem and we needed to earn more."
"My husband's job involved working for somebody else and it wasn't one that was sustainable in the long run," she explained. She found a job at Singapore Airlines cargo where she worked as a server from Monday to Friday. On the weekends, she was a cashier at the Singapore Turf Club's VIP room.īut as if by some invisible thread, life always drew her back to baking cakes. The business was eventually handed over to her older brother and Mdm Soh sought new pastures. Even as her father's health deteriorated, Mdm Soh continued to work at the family bakery. "I saw how pretty she was!" he explained with a rare laugh.Īfter the couple tied the knot, Mr Tan took up a job as a pastry chef at Orchard Hotel. When my dad was sick and asked him to help, he would always do it with a good spirit," she said.įor Mr Tan, there was one thing about Mdm Soh which caught his eye. "He was very hardworking and loved what he did. That’s why my dad didn't want us to do it," she said.Īnd soon, she also began to notice her future husband. "From my time spent helping, I could see how tiring this job was. It was not until she was in her early 20s that Mdm Soh began to work at the bakery full-time. But I never really noticed him, because I had my own life." "But I didn't pay much attention to him because I was still a student," she explained. "He'd been working at the shop ever since he was a young boy," Mdm Soh said of her husband, Mr Tan Yong Siang.
Back then they used ounces, so I noted that down," she recalled.īut it wasn't just ladyfingers and English macaroons that she would fall head over heels with. "My dad would allow me to go in the shop, and I would take down notes of whatever they were doing, take down the recipes. As she grew older, Mdm Soh would eventually spend more time in the bakery.