A sweet pop-up featuring cream puffs, honeycomb cake and jar desserts
The "thoughtfully curated" Albany gift store Morningtide hosts pop-ups on its front doorstep every weekend -- atmospheric rivers notwithstanding. Earlier this month, two white tents appeared side by side on a Saturday morning. Two men with robust 9 o'clock shadows stood next to each other, eyeing the small jewel boxes containing Topogato Chocolates and answering customers' questions in tandem.
Andrew Hong displayed his baked goods a stone's throw away. Hong has spent the past four years establishing his own identity apart from Van's, the bakery his parents first opened in Southern California in 1985. Hong and his sister currently manage the Van's San Jose location.
Known online as Droo the Baker, Hong has garnered a Bay Area following for his creative take on mooncakes and his baking skills in general. For each one of his Droo pop-ups, he curates about a half-dozen items. "One's going to be a type of cream puff. The flavor will change depending on the location," he said. "Then sliced cakes and jar desserts."
His Vietnamese honeycomb cake is a bestseller. Tinged green from pandan, it's as light as an angel food cake. Air bubbles form in the batter when it bakes. Out of the oven, the hardened bubbles resemble, abstractly, the shape of a honeycomb. "Most recipes use single-acting baking powder," Hong said. "You also preheat your pans. Once you pour the batter in, it's going to start that reaction right away that causes those bubbles to form."
I was also lucky enough to try a "Choux: Linda," his cream puff named in honor of Belinda Leong, the baker behind b. patisserie. A crisp hazelnut craquelin crowned the choux pastry, which, in turn, held a sumptuous combination of vanilla cream diplomat, cassis jam and a hazelnut buttercream. Hong first tasted those flavors together at b. patisserie. "I had their cake and that blew me away because it was my first time ever having cassis," he said. "They don't have hazelnuts in their cake, but I thought that was a nice nut pairing to make a little trio of flavors."
Mooncakes, according to Hong, are generally round with a yolk in the middle to symbolize the harvest moon. "It's supposed to be a time for gathering; to give thanks and hope for a bountiful harvest," he said. Home cooks and professional bakers make them every year to celebrate the Lunar New Year. While making them at Van's, Hong discovered how labor-intensive they are.
In his Droo the Baker incarnation, he decided to tweak his mother's mooncake recipes to modernize them while maintaining their essence. "I don't want to throw in Nutella or make it super Americanized," Hong said. "But I wanted to take a stab at creating my own flavors."
He makes his red-bean mooncakes with a raspberry dough. "Nothing too crazy, just different flavor combinations. Lookswise, tastewise, it sounds different but when you eat it, it's still very much a mooncake," he said. On a trip to Vietnam, he tried a drink that mixed pandan, coconut and macadamia nuts together. This combination inspired his variation on a snow-skin mooncake, a version that's coated in a rice skin reminiscent of mochi.
Hong believes the term "Asian fusion" doesn't really apply to his methodology. "When the term was first coined and got popular, it was primarily meant for restaurants," he said. "For baking and pastry, it doesn't really apply. It's more like an Asian influence."
Eventually he'd like to have a brick-and-mortar of his own, but for the short-term he'll continue with monthly pop-ups and bake sales. For the past couple of years, he's been gauging what customers respond to at a variety of different coffee and tea shops.
"I need to build a strong enough customer base and also, for me, to experiment and see what people like," Hong said. "I want to get feedback so I can also grow and build a more solid identity and business."