TILL 28 February 2025

Baker X @ Orchard Central

Baker X @ Orchard Central is a project to give budding home-baking entrepreneurs the opportunity to trial with a physical outlet and scale their business.

Through this initiative, Far East Organization aims to encourage the entry of new brands and enhance the business ecosystem in Singapore by providing customers with more choices and encouraging greater diversity.

Bakers work in a fully equipped baking studio and café, a physical space provided to them at no cost, over a period of 2 to 6 weeks to bake and sell. The cafe also houses social enterprise, Tea Ideas, which opens daily.

Our next baker is Pastories, operating from 16 October to 9 December 2024. We spoke to founder, Yeo Min, to find out more about her journey.

Pastories

Yeo Min is a pastry chef and author of ‘Chinese Pastry School’, a book that offers a comprehensive look at Chinese pastries to help home bakers understand and recreate them successfully. She started Pastories to tell stories through her bakes, and currently runs it as a home-based business offering custom cakes for special occasions as well as a range of classic Chinese pastries.

A fourth-generation Singaporean Chinese, Min’s great-grandparents travelled to Singapore from Southern China in the 1930s and her grandparents were born in Singapore just before the Second World War. Like much of the Chinese diaspora, she finds herself equal parts Chinese and not-so-Chinese — she eats as much bread as she does rice; scored a C for her O-Level Chinese but manages to write Chinese pop songs; and attended a French-focused pastry school but decided thereafter to specialise in Chinese pastries.

Her journey in the kitchen started as a necessity when she was an undergraduate student. Her activity of choice when procrastinating school projects was baking in communal kitchens. This inspired her to make a career switch to the food industry after working for two years as a social worker.

In 2021, Min took part in the Channel 8 baking competition, ‘Creme de la creme’. She impressed judges with her creativity and placed as a finalist on the show. In the same year, she took part in the World Gourmet Summit Apprentice Chef competition and placed second with a reinvented mooncake.

When not running Pastories, Yeo Min does food research, freelances as a pastry instructor and plays the cello in a community orchestra. Her dream is to open a museum of Singapore food one day!

Pastories will be offering their classics and bestsellers.

Look forward to their Gula melaka banana cake, Almond-sesame marble cake, Orange blossom sugee cake, Bandung tres leches, Mushroom rendang focaccia, Kueh kosui crumble bars and Egg tarts.

See you at the museum of food!