Balmoral Bakery

What’s not to love? This bakery is family run and has some of the loveliest cakes and pastries. My favourite has to be the doughnut balls on a stick #childhoodflashback and the custard puffs.
Their chicken pie is popular, though I have never had any. Hard to find the stomach room for pie after doughnuts and custard puffs.

This is unlike your commercial bakery found all over Singapore. They serve the traditional puffs and cakes that are now too rare or way too processed. Walking in, you will immediately realize that they have very different choices from most bakery and yet it smells wonderful. The aroma makes you want to get something.
A few specialties I have tried there are their char siew song, chicken pie and curry chicken puff. Their char siew song is my favorite. They make everything, including their char siew in-​house. It is very crispy on the outside and delicious barbecued char siew on the inside. The combination is just perfect. The curry chicken puff is also very tasty with spicy chicken, eggs and potato filling. Their prices are also very affordable at $ 1.20 — $ 1.80 a piece.
It is always lovely to find a local place that keeps some of the traditional flavors. Definitely worth a visit!

The simple things are often the best things, and the best things become part of special moments when you happen upon simple things unexpectedly. This is how the very best and fondly-​remembered food epiphanies unfold.
Consider the humble samosa, de rigeur at tea times and coffee breaks; I know I’ve carelessly stuffed more than a few of these into my indifferent maw at more courses, workshops or seminars than I care to remember. Then consider Balmoral Bakery’s version of this quotidian pastry, this workhorse of a tea time treat. Also wrapped in a paper thin popiah skin and deep-​fried, the wonder begins when that first bite trespasses this gossamer barrier and your tastebuds are ambushed by what’s inside. There is the sharp aromatic tang of curry, the starchy slightly sweet embrace of potato, made perfect by the sweet spice of sweated red onions and shallots. Oh yes, and Balmoral’s samosa has savory pieces of chicken in this already wonderful medley. Truly diabolical, methinks. I bit into this thing expecting the pedestrian experience of a plain samosa and end up with a curry puff wrapped in a popiah skin! It had all the elements of an epiphany of the finest kind, it involved a simple mouthful of something truly wonderful that I was not anticipating, that neither my brain nor the jaded papules of my tongue were expecting and I was left just a little breathless after that special first bite.
Just so very wonderfully cool to live, explore and eat in Singapore!

Being their customer for more than a decade proves how good this old school Hainanese Singaporean bakery is. Their cakes and pastries are good, especially their Samosas and chicken pie

This is the bakery that I always go to when I am in a particularly nostalgic mood. Everything is super old school– the kind of bakery that still pipes their cakes with sugary pastel-​coloured creams and cartoon figurines, even in an era where fondant reigns. Strangely though, there is something very comforting about the mixture of butter cream and sponge cake and perhaps that is the reason why I keep coming back.
It is possible to custom design your cakes. Everything looks kind of vintage and cool– I have seen cakes modeled after cars and having every bit of the ‘glossiness’ through the boss’ ingenious use of jelly icing, football poles on sports-​themed cakes made out of chocolate wafers etc. Prices are also pretty reasonable for the kind of handiwork you get. To me the best part of the cakes is that they always look so home made, not the kind of rive gauche cakes that you wouldnt even bear to cut up.

Balmoral Bakery is most probably one of Singapore’s longest standing and most authentic pie-​oneers, readying their piecrusts and baking for generations before us. 40 years is definitely a long, long time in a country that does not have much of a baking history, and their pies are testament to how they have managed to perfect their craft.
Coming in at an affordable $ 1.30, their chicken pies look exactly the same as they did back in 1965, as it’s still the same person behind and the exact same baking equipment. Their quality chicken chunks, and ‘al dente’ peas that burst with delicious gravy are sure to leave you hungering for more.

Having patronized this store for over 10 years, it was no difficult feat coming back for the cream horns that have played a significant part in my childhood. The cream horn ($ 1.20) is small-​more or the size of one’s palm-​and stuffed to the brim with cream. To date, this remains their signature product, and it cannot not be found in other bakeries. The bread is crispy, albeit sometimes a little burnt, and each bite causes a mini explosion of cream into one’s mouth and a shower of bread crumbs onto the floor. The shop claims to be one of the few carrying a new tasty treat called Napolean ($ 1.20), which cannot be yet found in any other shops. Other sweet treats worth trying would be the eggtarts ($ 1) and creampuffs ($ 1.10). Opening hours: Mon to Sun 9am-​8pm.