Cranki Patisserie: There’s very good pastry hiding in this odd Bukit Timah mall

King Albert Park Mall is an odd place.

There is an independent five-screen cinema called EagleWings Cinematics. A few units away is an eye specialist called Eagle Eye Centre. There is also an EagleWings Loft, EagleWings Mart and, should your fur baby needs one, a cat hotel, to boot. 

Tucked among this motley collection of businesses is the new home of Cranki Patisserie, a two-year-old pastry business run by friends Laura Lee, 26, and Brenan Yeo, 27.

The pair have moved into a small ground-floor unit at King Albert Park mall, their first brick-and-mortar storefront. 

It’s quite the change from spending much of Cranki Patisserie’s existence taking orders online, working out of a production kitchen in a mixed development mall near Haw Par Villa, or serving simple bakes at pop-ups across our sunny island. 

For the duo, the compact pastry shop in Bukit Timah finally allows customers to walk in, peer into the display and leave with whatever catches their eye. And that’s a pretty big deal. 

“People could never find us in the old kitchen,” Brenan says. 

“And frankly, it was a bit embarrassing. We don’t have anything to really show you from our brand, and you’re just picking up from this random place in the basement of some mall,” he adds, in reference to their Haw Par Villa kitchen.

The new shop, still somewhat cramped at first glance, gives them a bigger production kitchen, allows them to prepare more pastries for walk-ins and, importantly, puts them in front of the people who have been buying their food.

“We really wanted a space where our customers can interact with us face to face,” says Laura. Previously, most conversations with customers were through WhatsApp text or while they made deliveries.

Met while playing League of Legends

Laura and Brenan met online through video games in 2019 and became part of a friend group that gamed together regularly. By their recollection, there was a period when they were playing League of Legends every night. 

They are quick to admit that they are not a couple. Instead, they claim to be two feisty friends who have, by now, spent enough time together to know exactly how irritating the other person can be.

Laura considers that useful preparation for going into business together. “We’ve seen each other’s worst and how our temper can be like from gaming together,” she jokes. “So I knew I could work with him.”

The business idea came years after they first met.

Laura had brought dessert to a dinner they were having together. Brenan, half expecting typical bakes — such as brownies or cakes — to be served, was surprised when she unveiled a pastry box containing a polished strawberry-lime tart with mint jelly. 

“I was mind blown,” he recalls, of the taste and look.

Entrepreneurship begins from home

Running a business was not entirely foreign to the pair either. 

Laura says her family run a prawn business in Malaysia, while Brenan’s parents pursued very different careers: His mother is a professional hairstylist who runs a salon in Orchard, while his father worked in marketing for a multinational company.

Laura tells us that she began attending baking and cooking classes as early as kindergarten, and later studied Culinary and Catering Management at Temasek Polytechnic.

She honed her culinary chops while interning at Marina Bay Sands hotel’s main pastry kitchen for six months. Later on, she spent three years baking an assortment of pastries at Capella Singapore. 

Laura eventually pursued a degree in Business Communications at the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM), saying she wanted to understand the accounting, strategy and operational side of running a business, as well as the kitchen. Brenan, also a communications graduate from SIM, previously dabbled in bartending, design, and copywriting before starting the patisserie.

Today, Laura is Cranki Patisserie’s head baker while Brenan doubles up as its marketing and operational honcho. Even so, the division of labour between them is not always so neat these days. Laura jokes that she has also become the company’s plumber and electrician. Brenan, meanwhile, describes himself as its “professional dishwasher”.

Creating a cure for crankiness

Cranki officially launched after the pair graduated from university in 2024.

They pooled around $30,000 to get it off the ground, buying second-hand equipment and doing much of the work on their first production kitchen themselves. 

At one point, they revealed that they had been left with just three figures in each of their bank accounts after sinking much of their savings into the business.

Two years in, neither is drawing anything resembling a conventional salary. 

“We haven’t paid ourselves for the past two years,” Brenan tells us, explaining that they instead take a small monthly allowance while money stays in the company.

There have also been the less photogenic parts of entrepreneurship. Laura remembers periods, especially around festive orders, when the pair barely went home and survived on two hours of sleep.

They have since learnt to relinquish a little control and accept help from friends and family during crunch time. 

Even the name “Cranki”, short for crankiness, came from those long nights.

Ode to Southeast Asian flavours

Cranki Patisserie is not one to abandon its Southeast Asian-leaning instincts. Laura says the team still likes to work with flavours that feel familiar to this part of the world, from chrysanthemum to masala chai, while keeping the French pastry base intact. Everything uses French butter, and almost every component is made in-house, too.

“I guess 90% of everything we have here is made by us,” she says, including the pistachio paste and spice blends. 

So what should you try?

The choux au craquelin is the place to start. There are four options, of which the masala chai (S$8) is easily my favourite. The top shell of the choux is the craquelin, a streusel-like cap that’s essentially a thin, buttery, cookie crust. The diplomat cream (pastry cream lightened with whipped cream and cold butter) is silky, lush, and properly spiced.

Laura tells us that she blends her own mix of cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper, and cloves before steeping it into milk and tea for the filling; you most certainly can taste the effort.

The honeycomb chrysanthemum choux au craquelin (S$8) is more maximalist. There is floral chrysanthemum diplomat, airy white chocolate ganache, and shards of honeycomb candy — all fighting for attention in the same bite.

The brulee choux au craquelin (S$8), filled with Madagascar vanilla diplomat and salted caramel cremeux before being finished with caramel and brown-butter pecan crunch, is richer and straight up a sweet number.

The pistachio cherry choux au craquelin (S$8), with pistachio diplomat, salted pistachio praline, sour cherry curd, and toasted nuts, is similarly well made, though neither stayed with us quite as much as the masala chai.

Plus points for the remarkably bright and buttery salt aged lemon pound cake (from S$8). The team preserves lemons for a month with salt and lemon juice, borrowing from the Moroccan tradition of preserved lemons, where the fruit is packed with salt and left to soften and deepen in flavour over time. The pound cake is dense and moist, while the glaze made with both fresh and aged lemons brings a bright, clean tang.

Nutty pistachio meets umami-forward matcha in the matcha pistachio dacquoise (S$72, best ordered two days in advance) a decadent, textural number built on crisp-chewy almond dacquoise with salted pistachio feuilletine (crunchy crepe flakes) and a light and silky Narizuka Uji matcha diplomat.

It was through this cake that I first discovered the homegrown patisserie; I had bought one for my supervisor’s birthday, and she loved it, which to me seems like a fairly convincing endorsement.

The roasted double pistachio dacquoise (S$78, best ordered two days in advance) is deeply nutty, with a slight smokiness and very little sweetness. Like the matcha version, it is strongest on texture — crisp feuilletine against soft diplomat and chewy dacquoise. Sadly, I found the pistachio a little too dominant for my taste.

The brookie (S$6.50) is a rich slab of chocolate excess, made with three chocolates, including Callebaut 54.5% dark chocolate and a 56% single-origin Ecuador dark chocolate. Dense, fudgy, and unapologetically decadent, it deserves a short spell in the microwave, just long enough to loosen the centre and push all that chocolate into something even more excessive.

These pastries are apparently the tip of the iceberg. So what more is the duo looking to bring in? For starters, the Father’s Day stout & chocolate entremet (S$78) will become a permanent fixture due to popular demand, while the sea salt-black pepper almond cookies (from S$10 for 155g) are also due back. 

“Once we’ve settled into the new space, we want to start introducing more bakes, such as smaller portion bakes, as well,” says Brenan. “Hopefully, there’ll always be something new for people to come back for.”

In the meantime, Laura may be the pastry brain, but Cranki Patisserie is very much a team effort. Brenan handles much of the marketing and has run pop-ups on his own, while Laura leads the kitchen. Both still find time, occasionally, for a game of League of Legends, which is where their friendship began.

For all the polish of the pastries, there is still something pleasantly scrappy about Cranki. A group of young friends built it from very little, divided the work between them and kept going. In a crowded pastry scene, inundated with homebakers across Singapore, that alone is worth noticing. Plus, who could say no to a cure to life’s crankiness? I sure wouldn’t. 

This was a hosted tasting. 

For more ideas on what to eat, check out Orchard Plaza’s newest udon shop, or Marymount Bakehouse’s return to Upper Thomson!