SIX days a week, baker Ee Kok Chin stages a one-man show at his small stall in Changi Village, and what a show it is.

From dawn to dusk, he produces a dizzying range of snacks, cakes, tarts and Chinese pastries. These include breakfast snacks such as youtiao (dough fritters) and jiandui (dough balls), sweet treats such as pineapple sponge cakes and coconut tarts, and traditional favourites such as lou po bing (winter melon pastries) and tau sar piah (bean paste pastries).

TRICKY TREATS: Mr Ee serves the delicate wife cakes which have thin skins encasing a thick layer of winter melon filling.

I sneaked a peek behind the goodie-packed shelves when I was at the stall last week and no, I didn't see any elves helping the owner.

I was lucky to be visiting just before 3pm, because this is the time he brings out a fresh batch of lou po bing or wife cakes.

'Could you wait for five minutes?' he asked.

I certainly could, for the novelty of getting these hot cakes, not from a Hong Kong-style bakery but from a hawker centre baker.

That aside, the pastries (80 cents each) turned out to be quite tasty.

Wife cakes - so named because a baker sold enough of them to save his wife from slavery, or so one of the legends goes - are tricky things. The winter melon filling has to be thick and firm, and the pastry casing has to be thin and flaky.

Mr Ee's pastries passed muster, certainly. I liked it, too, that the filling wasn't too sugary.

His mastery of different desserts also showed in the tau sar piah (60 cents for a large one, and $1 for three small ones) and the pineapple sponge (80 cents each).

The former crumbled just so, yielding soft grains of mung bean filling - 100 per cent choke-proof.

The latter was nice and dense. And again, neither of them was too sweet.

I don't know about you but the controlled use of sugar just sweetens the deal for me.

Confectionery
Block 2 Changi Village Road, 01-29,
Open: 5.30am - 6pm, closed on Mondays
Rating: *** 1/2

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on Mar 9, 2008.

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