May’s Cake House

Great Chinese bakery with a little bit of everything. Char Siu Baos, cream rolls, siu mai and wonderful cakes. Cakes are awesome…8, 9 or 10 inch cakes for various prices. Recently got mango mousse cake and green tea cake, both w/​fruit inside and out. Call them for prices for cakes. Cash only.

I’m so disappointed in the taro cake! It was the most artificial thing I’ve ever tasted. SOOO disappointing because I bought this for my sister’s birthday. Everyone hated it. The only decent thing was the mango cake, which that wasn’t even that special. I’m never ordering cakes from here again. At least NOT the taro cake. Awful.
At least the ordering process was fine, the lady was nice and had my order ready for when I requested it.

Love their mango mousse cake. Need to call and order ahead to make sure they make your a fresh one

The best mango mousse cake in the city! I order it for everyone’s birthday. The cream/​frosting is not too sweet and cake is very moist. The chern fun «flat shrimp» noodle used to be good but now the noodle is a bit thick. Cash only

i work nearby, so May’s is my go-​to whenever i need a quick breakfast fix.
open at 7:30am, their «ja leung» (steamed rice rolls w/​fried dough) are usually not out till 8:15; the other «cheung fun» (steamed rice rolls w/​minced beef or shrimps inside) are usually available, though. along with a variety of bao.
selection of «bao» (bread/​buns) is about the usual, plus or minus a couple variations, like «nor mai gai» (savory sticky rice steamed in lotus leaf), «jung» (another type of savory sticky rice steamed in leaf), «siu mai» (pork dumplings), «jok» (rice porridge), etc. but being there almost 3 – 4 times a week, one simply gets tired of everything sooner or later. not their fault; i just need to vary my diet. ha
wish they have «ci fan» (sticky rice with crunchy mustard green & fried dough) too. maybe some innovations on food items once in a while, for a change. «HK milk tea» is from tea bags, which one can get from CMart two blocks down.
on the up side, their baos are of decent quality, and cakes (single pieces and whole cakes) are fluffy and light, not overly sweet — the lemon triangle is my favorite. one can get a ready-​made whole cake on the spot, or custom order one in advance with preferred fillings.
one thing that kind of bothers me… ok TWO things. first off, like any other Chinese bakery in the area, there’s no line system. people crowd the counter and the ladies just call «next» without really knowing/​caring who’s there first. you’re really at the mercy of the self-​discipline of patrons (or the lack thereof) to make or break your day.
also, like many other eateries inside or outside ctown, the ladies probably wear the same pair of gloves for the whole day, one second grabbing your orders and next second exchanging monies. kinda ewww when the gloves are really protecting their hands more than ensuring cleanliness of your food. good thing they also use tongs to grab the non-​individually packed stuff, and food goes straight into small little bags before they get dropped into plastic bag, so less ewww there.
there also seems to be a good variety of bottled drinks in the fridges, from soy milk to herbal teas, but I rarely get that far.
for all the reasons above, 3.5 stars.
p. s. cash only.

May’s Cake House has the best birthday cakes! They are very pretty and I especially love the fresh strawberry cake. The frosting is to die for! The price is reasonable for the quality of the cake. I always buy chinese sponge cakes from here. The only thing is that they may not have whole cakes available to sell on the spot so just make sure you call ahead to pre-​order one.

May’s has the best «Dai bao» in all of Chinatown. I’ve tried them all and May’s beats them all in the bun fluffiness and taste. They also have really good cakes. The fruit is fresh and the cake is spongy and not too sweet. We typically get our mother’s day cake here and it’s always a hit.

Mango mosses is the best! My family order it for everyone’s birthday.

I love the beef cheung fun so much! Yeah, they charged me $ 3 instead of $ 2.90, i guess they were lazy to give change? But that’s okay, i wasn’t gonna take it anyways.

I usually come by to grab breakfast in the morning. I’m a big fan of their fried dough wrapped in steamed rice noodle. It’s usually $ 2.45 and I get it with a custard filled bun or taro bun.
It’s a nice little place you walk down the stairs. Couple of chairs and tables. Just found out they also serve congee so will give that a shot next time.

great food not expensive and I love their coffee. A must visit if you are in the area!

May’s Cake House is located in Tai Tung Villiage at the edge of Boston’s Chinatown. I grew up around this area and would go there on Fridays after school. Today I dropped by to pick up some cakes for my friends birthday party.
Price: The prices on items range anywhere from 1 $ to 2 $ but is worth it. I purchased a few of their Cream Rolls, a Coffee Cake, Strawberry Cake, Custard Tarts and a Sponge Cake for a total of $ 7.30.
Treats: The Cream Rolls are slices of rolled up sponge cakes with cream inside. Though unlike other bakeries that use frosting, their cream fillings are not too overly sweet. These are perfect for when you’re on the go since they come wrapped in a plastic bag, easily accessible when I’m in a hurry.
The Sponge Cakes are also good because they’re just a giant cupcake with little frosting but one of my favorites is the Coffee Cakes. It has two layers of coffee flavored sponge cake with a light coffee mouse filling. It’s topped with shaved coconut, chocolate covered coffee beans and almonds.
The Strawberry Cake has 2 layers of surprisingly moist sponge cake with a layer of cream and fruits in between. It’s topped with fresh strawberries and peach slices. My one grievance with this cake is the fact that the fruit filling is the from a canned fruit mixture but otherwise it’s delicious.
Atmosphere & Location: The bakery itself is very small and has only 3 tables with 2 chairs per table. Obviously this isn’t a place where you’d sit down and enjoy a meal, it’s more of a place just to grab a quick treat for yourself or friends. The ladies that work there are very nice and speak both Chinese and English. While I only ordered sweets today, they do have a few savory food options including pork buns, dim sum and sticky rice buns. They sticky rice buns are full of flavor and the workers will often offer to heat them up for you.
If you’re the type of person that likes a lot of sweets at a decent price, then May’s Cake House is a place I highly recommend. Their Apple Turnovers are to die for!

Quick service and yummy baos! My family normally gets the cha siew (pork) bao, chocolate/​vanilla cakes, lemon cakes, wife cakes, and the cha siew pastry!
Their other baos and morning goods are also great. Try them all!

This is my favorite bakery in the area. It’s like two blocks down from Chinatown, but I’d rather make my way here than go to the other bakeries in Chinatown. The cakes are really yummy and doesn’t have that weird taste that frosting tend to have from 50% of other Asian bakeries. They’re pretty affordable, I think I got a decent-​sized one for $ 16 – 18, which was a lot cheaper than what I was expecting.
The buns are also yummy! They do run out as the day goes by, but that’s usually if you go there pretty late and it makes sense. They’re very affordable, and usually $ 1 or less. My favorite is their sticky rice bun ($ 1), you should definitely try that if you have never done so before.
Another favorite is their shrimp steamed noodles ($ 3) and I usually get that if I need breakfast and I’m in the area. Just because it’s not from a dimsum place doesn’t mean it isn’t as good!

His: They do not speak english. Just point. It’s cheap.
Try: Snowballs (They are amazing)
Hers: The actual place smells weird, which is a turn off… HOWEVER, their pastries are delicious and inexpensive. Most of the women that work there are all business, and don’t speak that much English. It’s not really that they’re rude — just point to something if they don’t understand what you’re asking for.
They have buns in a heater in the back corner, so don’t forget to try those! The custard bun, pineapple bun, and corn bun are pretty good. The pineapple bun didn’t really have any pineapple though — it was more like sugar cookie coated with a sweet glaze.
In the main display: They have a coconut bun and dried pork bun (my fave) cut down the middle and filled with butter. The Snowball is like super soft mochi with coconut, a little bit of sesame seed and sugar in the middle — delicious! There is a sesame seed ball which is tasty too! It’s nice and crispy — coated with sesame seeds — around a thin layer of mochi, which is then around red bean. The coconut custard is just okay. The steamed buns with pork and stuff are also pretty ordinary. I would stick to the dessert type stuff!
Cash only!!!

I’ve made 3 or 4 runs here for birthday cakes, with more to come. Awesome mango mousse. It’s light but has a satisfying texture, with a just-​strong-​enough mango flavor held in it.
The fruit cake is frickin’ cheap and wins praises ($ 18 for 9″). Seriously, nowhere else have I been able to find these. One downside is if you order by phone, you don’t really know what it looks like, and if you go in person, there isn’t a huge variety of cakes they just keep out there.
Warning, they always seem to be short on buns. Can’t get my red bean bun fix here. However, they have plenty of candles that I grab every single time now.
Cash only.

May’s Cake House is a slightly sunken café on the outskirts of Chinatown, lauded with many stars in Unilocal,and with such a pretty name, who wouldn’t expect it to be a wonderland of baked goods? Well, pooey. It’s a subterranean joint that smelled funny right when I walked in the door… and sniffing your nose and thinking something is dodgy is hardly a good sign at a bakery. The two cases were crowded with very little cake and many starch bombs all guaranteed to stay in your digestive tract long after you’d like to forget you’d eaten them.
I ordered a coconut ball that turned out to be a gelatinous, wobbling softball of rice starch covering a nest of crunchy roast sesame seeds. Once you get past the texture of jellied starch, the filling is quite good… but dense enough that one artfully applied coconut ball could easily plug a hole in the Hoover Dam.
I moved on to what looked like a round sesame pastry the size of an egg. I imagined it would taste like those lovely syrup soaked balls that come for dessert at an Indian restaurant. But, oh no, it was a deep fried sesame bomb with half an inch of gelatinous rice product followed by a tongue paralyzing blob of red bean paste. It was more than my hardy constitution could take. The first and only time a fried item has defeated me, and the infamy of it goes solely to May’s Cake House.
Which is not to say that there’s no cake at all at May’s Cake House… I just never made it past the sesame bomb and the wobbly coco monster. Maybe it was the skimpy selection, or the yellowy trays, but the cake section managed to look vaguely depressed.
I left May’s completely puzzled as to how it had garnered so many stars on Unilocal.The people behind the counter were really very nice, but my advice is to stick with Bao Bao’s, Great Taste, or Eldo’s.
Happy Snacking!
@bakery_babe

The shrimp noodle dim sum dish here is really good! I got it at 4 PM on an afternoon, so they actually sold it to me cold, but for the price, who am I to complain? I can just put it in the microwave myself. They also sell the same thing, but with beef inside too, I tried that. Stick with the shrimp.
Their coconut jello is also really good. $.80 apiece too!

It’s ok. I’ve tried 3 things here:
Big Bun: $ 1.75, so pricier than other places and a little smaller too. The inside is really good and I give them credit for the quality; however, the bun itself is a tad dry and dense. It’s not fluffy like at Coffee House.
Steamed Pork Bun: $ 1. Again, same thing as the big bun. The inside is really good and I feel there’s a lot of non-​gelatinous quality pork etc. going into it. But the bun is just not up to par with other bakeries.
Sticky Rice Bun: $ 1. This was probably my favorite, only because it was so different. The sticky rice inside was great flavor. I could eat that stuff all day. The bun in this one is the same dough, but it’s better because it’s about half as thick, so it’s moister and airier. But it’s mostly just bun and rice. Not exactly something you’d get as a meal. Maybe a side?
I’d return to try something else, but not the same stuff. If I could I’d only eat the interiors of these buns, but alas…

Looking for something to eat, but only have one dollar to spare? Are you not willing to spend that dollar on a candy bar or on the Value Menu at a fast food place such as a McChicken at a McDonald’s (I have nothing against McDonald’s, only their unhealthy options)? Well, if you are in the vicinity of the Boston Chinatown area, this bakery is one of the many options to get something really inexpensive to eat or to snack on and it shows that you can get pretty far with only $ 1 or $ 2.
I had two versions of the Cha Siu Bau (Roasted Pork Bun in Cantonese Chinese) here. I have had the steamed one and the baked one. The steamed Cha Siu Bau has a white exterior while the baked one uses a different dough and has a glazed brownish gold exterior. $ 1 should be enough to buy you one. I personally prefer the steamed version because I think the bun is fluffier but they have to heat it up for you in the microwave. I think the baked version is a little smaller compared to the ones sold at other Chinese bakeries but it’s not a bad choice since it comes out of their baking ovens and it’s tasty.
Another bun I have eaten are the Sticky Rice Buns. They are also $ 1 a piece, and other than rice, I think there are pieces of chopped meat and Chinese mushrooms inside. The Sticky Rice Buns are decent, the rice inside was tasty.
I also have eaten some of the dim sum dishes here. I ordered two pieces of Siu Mai (loosely means cook and sell), also known as the Pork and Shrimp Dumpling on some dim sum menus. Each piece is $.65, so if you order four of them, it’s about a few cents cheaper compared four pieces of Siu Mai at a regular dim sum restaurant. However, you have to ask them to heat them up for you from their microwave. The Siu Mai was okay, nothing too special.
The Dan Taat (English loanword for egg tart) they serve are also good, they are big (approx. 6 cm wide) compared to the ones served at some dim sum restaurants and they are $.70 for a piece.
If you are willing to spend more money, $ 2.90 can buy you a container filled with four pieces of Ha Cheung Fun (Shrimp wrapped in a rice noodle roll). You have to ask them to heat it up for you. They are also pretty good when doused with the soy sauce.
I went here recently (with a really empty stomach) for lunch, and had the following:
1 container of Ha Cheung Fun ($ 2.90)
2 Siu Mai pieces ($.65×2 = $ 1.30)
1 Cha Siu Bau ($ 1)
1 Dan Taat piece ($.70)
The total came up to $ 5.90, and after eating, my stomach was really full for the rest of the day. So this bakery is a decent inexpensive choice to get some small desserts, good buns, or even some dim sum without having to sit in a dim sum restaurant.