Siamy Tan with some of the jelly cakes she’s made, with their lifelike flower decorations. The Malaysian-born baker has started teachin the art in Hong Kong.A lot of Instagram bakers are easily impressed when they make a pretty cupcake, but Siamy Tan is taking dessert design to another level.
“I knew about this art for a long, long time, probably over 30 years,” Tan says of jelly cake making, which is prevalent in Southeast Asian countries like Thailand , Malaysia and Singapore . As a qualified architect and hobby painter, Tan has a creative streak. She only took up jelly cake design in May 2022. But with her obsessive personality, she was immediately making weeks’ worth of jelly cakes in days.
When Tan returned to Hong Kong, she decided to share her new hobby and offered a couple of classes through a Malaysian Facebook group, and the response overwhelmed her. She says that mastering needle carving and injecting is not the most difficult challenge. It is the preparation process to ensure the jelly doesn’t dry out, to know when to start jabbing before the cake gets too set, as well as how to create flavours in the jelly.