Fillers

After lunch at Kai Kee, we made for the direction of Victoria Harbour. There’s a bar there Luchie used to work at, right along the waterfront, and we were hoping a leisurely stroll would clear enough room in our tummies for dessert.

We had barely hit our stride when we came upon this bakery — St. Lolan — and stopped dead in our tracks. You would have, too, confronted with a wall of tastefully festooned mini-cakes. The craftsmanship was awesome in its understated simplicity; it takes a sure hand to make something look effortlessly elegant. I should know: I have yet to decorate a cake that came out nice — and I’m being very charitable with myself here.

I mean, how can you fail to admire something like this?

Sure, it’s mostly sugar sculpture, but one that communicates the essence of the cake. One look and you know it’s mango — a very obvious example, admittedly. On the other hand, it can just look… well, like this:

That’s their coffee cake, topped with sugar-dusted strawberries — they looked real enough to me — girding some dead leaves (that part I hoped was marzipan). I have made coffee cake before, and it was quite good, you just had to taste it. Spiffed up like this, it would have tasted twice as good. Or maybe not, but there would have been much more to appreciate. Yes, I sigh.

How about bait worms on your dessert? If only because I have not tasted chestnut cake before, sure.

But what really grabbed my attention was the smaller case adjacent to the cake display. I took the following photo on our return late the next day, so most of the hopia had been sold out.

We purchased a dozen of each, and they were all good, some more savory than the others. I preferred the flat ones, which were closer in taste to our Pinoy hopia, if flakier and less densely filled. And fresh — fresh hopia is the best hopia.

The sign said “green bean pastry,” so I assumed that meant mung beans. If that was the case, the filling looked and tasted much lighter.

These had candied winter melon, but no scallion/spring onion, so it was not fair to compare them to our beloved hopia baboy (pork). More sweet than savory, and easily my favorite of the lot.

From the cake case, we picked out a tub of breadcrumb pudding. And what were we expecting? Frankly, nothing — and that was exactly what it tasted like.

But we did end dessert on a high note across Belcher Bay with a perfectly executed crème brulèe on a bed of Kahlúa-macerated dates that Luchie proudly pointed out was prepared by a goddaughter of hers, also Pinay. Indeed, what would Hong Kong be like without Filipinos? Like Luchie told the Chinese shop assistant at St. Lolan, “You’re young and beautiful; must you be rude, too?”

St. Lolan
G/F 118 Belcher St.
Kennedy Town, Hong Kong