A day in the life of Hung Huat Cake & Pastries’ third-gen owners, who bring fresh twists to time-honoured recipes
- Husband-and-wife duo Sim Weijie and Amanda Chua, both 34, are the third-generation owners of Hung Huat Cakes & Pastries.
- We shadow the impassioned couple for a morning to learn the ins-and-outs of running a successful traditional hawker bakery.
- The couple, both of whom switched careers to join the business full-time, share what it’s like to preserve the family legacy and put fresh spins on time-honoured recipes.
The sky was enshrouded in darkness, and most of the city was still asleep, when my alarm pulled me awake at 5:30am.
I leapt out of bed beary-eyed. I was due at Sims Vista Market & Food Centre to meet our profiles for the day: 34-year-olds Sim Weijie and Amanda Chua, the impassioned husband-and-wife duo — and third-generation owners — of Hung Huat Cakes & Pastries.
We’d be shadowing them for the day to glean the ins-and-outs of running a successful hawker bakery stall.
It was close to 6.45am when I arrived at the hawker centre. Navigating my way through the unusually peaceful aisles of hawker stalls, I keep my eyes peeled for stall 01-48.
Soon enough, I spot the pair in the midst of rolling up the shutters. Ah, just in time!
Weijie and Amanda wave me over with bright, warm smiles on their faces. I immediately felt a sense of familiarity, as though I’d known them for a long time.
Once all the formalities are out of the way, Weijie runs me through the timeline for the day.
The couple starts every morning with some housekeeping duties. The first order of business is to get the kitchen spick and span: Wiping down all the kitchen equipment and ensuring it’s in tip-top shape.
The family patriarch, Sim Heng Hung, 67, soon arrives at the stall, pushing a trolley stacked tall with baskets of biscuits, cakes and kuehs.
Although he’s semi-retired now, he still chooses to help out on most mornings, delivering the pastries from the Hung Huat central kitchen.
If you’re a Hung Huat regular, you would have found a familiar figure missing this morning — Weijie’s mother, Liau Cheok Wan, 64 — or Aunty Liau, as she’s often known as.
These days, she spends most of her days at the business’s central kitchen, where she continues to churn out Hung Huat’s pastries from scratch. Baking is in her blood — so much so that she can’t pull herself away from the kitchen.
Aunty Liau used to be the face of Hung Huat, but Weijie and Amanda been running things since 2023. And they’ve been doing a fantastic job so far — the pair work in a steady tandem to ensure daily operations flow with ease.
Before the duo became hawkers, Weijie had been a teacher for about seven years, while Amanda worked at the Agency for Integrated Care.
Both Uncle Sim and Aunty Liau were getting older, and the young couple wanted to take the burden of running a full-time business off their shoulders.
“Growing up, Hung Huat has always been a family thing,” Weijie adds. “The things we do here are part of our family tradition — like coming together to bake. It won’t be the same if we sell the business.”
To him, Hung Huat is the heart and soul of the family.
That’s why every morning — rain or shine — Weijie and Amanda toll at the stall, even if it means waking up as early as 4:30am, during busier periods.
The moment he spots his father, Weijie immediately rushes over to help. Both Uncle Sim and Weijie then carefully unload the pastries one by one and display them neatly outside the stall.
There’s the yam paste-filled orh nee ang ku kueh ($1.60), flaky tau sar piah (S$4.50 for five), and many others.
Drawn to Hung Huat’s vibrant showcase of pastries, a couple of curious customers — early birds, considering the hour — began to mill outside the stall to peruse the stall’s fresh wares.
The tau sar piah — a crumbly traditional Teochew pastry filled with a sweet or savoury mung bean paste — seems to be popular with the crowd, with its flaky crust and rich filling within.
“When my mom took over the stall from my grandparents in the mid 1980s, she created her own original recipes, such as this tau sar piah,” Weijie says.
It’s free of additives and baked with reduced sugar — as are all of Hung Huat’s bakes — to cater to the older folks in the area.
Traditional bakes, made from scratch
Other bestselling items include its pumpkin kueh (S$3) and ondeh ondeh (S$3), which Amanda prepares fresh every morning.
She cooks them in batches of about 50 pieces or so, with each tray selling out almost as quickly as she can make them, with everything usually gone by noon.
But before she can get started, Amanda needs to take a short jaunt to the other side of the market — to visit one of the wet market vendors.
There’s a stall that she always procures fresh ingredients from — the very same one that Aunty Liau used to patronise.
The shop, bursting with boxes upon boxes of vegetables, is helmed by a smiley old man. Amanda says he’s the go-to supplier among the other stalls at Sims Vista hawker centre, as he carries the largest assortment of quality produce.
“He usually leaves the freshest ingredients for us,” Amanda says, smiling.
“I’d never chosen a sweet potato in my life, until I started working at Hung Huat,” she adds, with a laugh. When she first started, Aunty Liau would guide her on picking the freshest, tastiest ingredients.
Says Amanda: “Now, for sweet potatoes, I know to look for sparkly skin with no holes. It will turn into a bright colour after it’s steamed.”
It’s best to buy at least 3kg of ingredients, she adds. If there’s not enough stock, it means smaller kueh batches for the day.
Once she’s done grocery shopping, Amanda heads back to the stall to start on the first batch of ondeh ondeh.
The sweet potatoes then undergo a very manual process of being transformed into dough: Washed, shredded, chopped, then steamed, mashed and kneaded together with some of Hung Huat’s housemade flour mix.
After splitting them into evenly sized dough balls, she gently forms a small indentation in each one. Gula melaka is then wrapped within the dough, and lowered into a hot, bubbling pot of water, where it boils for about five minutes.
Having worked at the stall — and being well-trained by Aunty Liau — since 2023, Amanda’s got the process down pat, moving from step to step smoothly and swiftly.
Once the rotund ondeh ondeh is cooked to a chewy, melt-in-your-mouth decadence, she adds the final touch to it — a delicate coat of shredded coconut bits.
The entire process, from procuring the ingredients and cooking the kueh, is laborious, and takes Amanda about two to three hours on average. It requires plenty of patience and dedication to whip up at least three batches of ondeh ondeh in a day, but she has since gotten used to it.
We got to sample the freshly made, much-coveted treat for ourselves, and it’s a dainty, fluffy morsel that simply oozes rich, sticky gula melaka gold.
It’s not too sweet, either, with the shredded coconut adding a touch of saltiness to the kueh. You could devour a handful of these pastries at one go, without it feeling the least bit jelak (overly rich).
Much like the ondeh ondeh, the orange-tinged pumpkin kueh undergoes a similar cooking process, albeit with a red bean filling instead.
It’s perfumed with the earthiness of pumpkin, while the smooth, creamy red bean core adds a nice contrast in flavour and texture.
These two pastries — the ondeh ondeh and pumpkin kueh — are made fresh and sold at Hung Huat daily. Meanwhile, its coconut sugar kueh (S$3) and purple sweet potato kueh (S$3) are only available on the weekend.
While Amanda spends the bulk of her time in the kitchen with each batch of delicious kueh, Weijie runs the front-of-house.
The majority of Hung Huat’s customers are regulars, many of whom have been visiting the stall since Aunty Liau was fronting the business. Weijie has taken the effort to remember each and every person that stops by.
Ever the friendly guy, he greets them all with a bright smile and a morning greeting. He knows their go-to orders like the back of his hand, too.
To Weijie and Amanda, Hung Huat is more than just a business. Their customers are like family, and their warmth is what makes the experience at Hung Huat so special.
Modern spins on tried-and-true classics
In between kueh batches and customers, the pair finds pockets of time to get a headstart on tomorrow’s work — ingredient preparation, customer pre-orders and so on.
One such order is for Hung Huat’s Hokkaido milk mochi and signature Teochew orh nee (S$7) — a riff off the time-honoured Teochew orh nee mooncake that Weijie came up with in 2023.
He created this recipe after seeing the demand for Hung Huat’s original Teochew orh nee mooncake (S$12), thinking that the addition of silky milk mochi would make for an innovative flavour pairing.
It proved to be a hit. Customers liked it so much that they’d enjoy the pastry all year round — even gifting them for weddings and baby showers — and not just during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
It’s only available for pre-order only, chiefly because it can take Weijie and Amanda many hours to make everything by hand.
We get that, but it’s just so good that I think Weijie should make it a permanent addition to the store’s daily line-up of treats, just like the ondeh ondeh.
It’s an exquisite, purple-hued pastry boasting a “thousand-layer skin” — thin, flaky layers with a spiral-like appearance. Inside, it comprises silky yam paste and chewy, hand-pulled milk mochi, both of which are made in-house.
It’s also baked (instead of fried, which most places tend to do), so that it isn’t too greasy, yet still retains its light and crispy texture.
Real yam doesn’t last very long in Singapore’s climate, says Weijie, which makes working with the ingredient a challenge.
“We want it to be as fresh as possible,” he says, adding that Hung Huat tries to prepare it on the day itself, or at most, a day prior.
If milk mochi fillings aren’t quite your thing, Hung Huat also boasts an intriguing Orhneemisu (S$16) — orh nee in a tiramisu — that’s infused with earl grey, and black Sesamisu (S$17) with roasted black sesame paste and hints of white chrysanthemum. These are available for preorders on the weekend.
According to Weijie, Hung Huat is the first bakery to come up with such novel creations. He feels that this is the way to appeal to the younger crowd, who tend to gravitate towards unconventional pastry pairings.
It’s also a way to modernise the business and keep up with food trends.
The central kitchen in Kovan has also proven to be essential to Hung Huat’s processes. Some pastries and kuehs, such as ang ku kueh and tau sar piah, are prepared there the day before.
It’s simply not possible to make so many types of pastries at the tiny stall at Sims Vista Market. “We need to prepare what we can in advance at the central kitchen,” he says. “If we do it all at the stall on the day itself, it will be too busy, and we won’t have enough things to sell.”
It also allows them to simplify things: They’ll only need to reheat the pastries, steam them, or lightly bake them later on.
After the stall shutters at 2:30pm, the Sim family comes together every night to plan what pastries to bake at the central kitchen, what to deliver to the stall in the mornings, and so on.
Depending on what the family decides, the slate of pastries available varies from day to day, but they’re as fresh as they can get.
“People like to sell the idea of serving pastries ‘fresh from the oven’, but they’re usually baked in advance, especially those that use real butter,” Weijie says, with a grin. “That’s because the butter must first set and soften to achieve a melt-in-your-mouth texture.”
It’s clear to see that Hung Huat Cakes & Pastries isn’t your run-of-the-mill hawker bakery. Boasting almost five decades in the scene, it’s a stall with plenty of heart, flavour and history.
And for Weijie and Amanda, they have no intentions to expand the family business, for now. All they hope for is to continue serving customers with only the best, and preserve Hung Huat’s legacy — it’s more than enough for them.
For more ideas on what to eat, read more about the heartland teahouse at Macpherson and Si Chuan Dou Hua’s all-you-can-eat lunch dim sum buffet.
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You can also book a ride to Hung Huat Cakes & Pastries at Aljunied.
Hung Huat Cakes & Pastries
Sims Vista Market & Food Centre, 01-48, 49 Sims Place
Nearest MRT station: Aljunied
Open: Tuesday to Sunday (7.30am to 2.30pm)
Sims Vista Market & Food Centre, 01-48, 49 Sims Place
Nearest MRT station: Aljunied
Open: Tuesday to Sunday (7.30am to 2.30pm)
