Home-run bakery is shooting for the moon
22-year-old Cathy Fan is reinventing mooncakes with new delectable ingredients like matcha, biscoff and ube. Eda Tang enjoys a taste of tradition with a twist.
When she’s not doing her engineering day job, Cathy Fan is running her at-home bakery business, Fankery. The business, which she runs with her mum, was born during the 2020 lockdowns when Fan would experiment with making cheesecakes and cookies filled with sweet, gooey mochi (a rice cake made of mochigome, a short-grain rice).
Fast forward two years, Fan is reinventing traditional Chinese foods to share with her customers.
Every week she’s delivering around 50 boxes of mooncakes in preparation for MidAutumn Festival, an East Asian celebration of the end of the autumn harvest in the northern hemisphere.
Fan’s mooncakes stretch beyond the imagination of the traditional Cantonese soft crust, filled with sweet red bean or lotus seed paste and salted egg yolks, and materialised her heart’s desire of a chocolate and Biscoff mooncake. She’s played with contemporary flavours like ube taro, double matcha, red velvet and peanut, and charcoal and coconut custard to breathe new life into the buttery, crusty treat. Fan is not shy with savoury either, making flaky Suzhou mooncakes with a generous juicy pork filling.
Making and eating food has always been important in Fan’s family, and she remembers her grandad taking her to kindergarten on his bicycle in Shanghai. ‘‘He would pick me up, and he would buy us roast duck or egg rolls on the sidewalk.’’
Fan’s mum also never failed to keep her daughters fed. ‘‘Basically anything we’d want to eat, she would try to create it. To her, it’s more of a passion project. Whereas I want to grow this [business] bigger, and to make our name known to more people, have more people from different cultures try our food and learn why we do what we do.’’
While studying for a Bachelor of Engineering, Fan experimented with baking, learning from her mum. Friends and family would buy their creations, but they only had about four sales a year at the busiest of times.
It wasn’t until last year’s lockdown, during which Fan was hit hard by hypothyroidism, when her focus shifted. Having been a bodybuilder and part-time personal trainer during her studies, she struggled with her body shutting down and fatigue.
‘‘I started spending more time in the kitchen and trying things I’d never tried before. I love mochi, and I was just like, ‘oh, I’ll just put in a brownie’, and then that was kind of where I started.’’
Fan went from making two or three cakes a week to realising a business opportunity when one of her Instagram reels caught the eye of keen customers.
So far this year, Fan has run orders for 120 customers who are ordering between one and 20 boxes of mooncakes.
‘‘Now, I really can’t meet the customer demand because I just don’t have that time and I don’t have the equipment to make it. My next step is looking into a commercial kitchen and renting a space.’’
She runs deliveries in her own car, driving across Tā maki Makaurau to bring smiles to faces.
‘‘From baking, you’re able to actually connect on a deeper level with all these people. My dream is to have my own cafe but I can’t just yet because I still enjoy my engineering job.’’
Fan knows that her mother gets gratification out of making food for her customers. ‘‘She makes breads like polo buns, ham and cheese buns, and pork floss buns... all the pork floss is house-made too.’’
Fan dreams of mooncakes being enjoyed any time during the year and not limited to Mid-Autumn Festival.
‘‘At the end of last year, a Polynesian auntie ordered like 20 boxes for a
Christmas gathering... I was just like, wow, it means so much.’’
Fan dreams of Fankery to be a familyrun dessert cafe serving coffee and sweet treats like mooncakes, breads, swiss rolls that ‘‘always bring that homemade touch to it... I want it to be an environment where anyone can come in and enjoy a chat with a friend’’.
And she sees the potential in changing up the pastry. ‘‘Why do you have to stick to that old flavour portfolio? If you want more than one larger population to enjoy your food, then you have to keep up with the changes in the world.’’