Sunday, September 17, 2017

Hong Kong - Hei Lee Bakery

Hei Lee Bakery - visited August 28, 2017
Since Jenny Bakery didn’t offer any samples of their cookies, it was fortunate that literally next door to them was Hei Lee Bakery. They didn’t offer samples either but they had individual baked goods for sale and were the more typical Asian bakery I had been hoping for in Hong Kong.

If you’ve never gone to an Asian bakery before, get the bread or any bread product. They make the best, no lie. I don’t happen to like the paste-filled stuff as in rolls filled with red bean paste or mung beans or any other kind of bean paste but I do like the baked pork buns and the cocktail buns which are filled with coconut and sugar. The pineapple buns are good too although I don’t get the name since they don’t contain a lick of pineapple in them. Instead, they’re fluffy, pillowy, delicious sweet rolls. Like King’s Hawaiian rolls on steroids but better.

Sandra and I had already had a typical Chinese breakfast earlier (pork chop with rice noodles and broth for me) but given we’d slogged 4 kilometers in pouring rain to buy cookies we wouldn’t be able to eat for another 5 days, we deserved a little local bakery goodness. The heat and humidity were doing a bang up job suppressing my appetite and we had designs on dim sum for lunch (next post) so I exercised some self control and only bought a cocktail bun and an egg white coconut tart for later.

Hei Lee Bakery’s offerings were similar to Sheng KeeBakery which I visit regularly back home – probably too regularly. They had the usual fare of bean paste-filled buns, cocktail buns, buns filled with hot dog (it’s an Asia thing), pork buns, bread rolls, bread slices and butter cookies. The cookies are only sold by the pound and the minimum you could buy was half a pound. Sandra bought some for us to share later but we both ended up forgetting about them and I never tried them. 


The cocktail bun was good though. I ate the egg white coconut tart the next day but forgot to take a close up of it. It was a little dry. I don’t know if that’s because I ate it a day later or if that’s how it’s supposed to be but the texture of the bottom crust was a bit dry and crumbly and the filling was also (I think intentionally) dry. It wasn’t a custard filling but more like a dense cake that wasn’t cakey. The flavor was good but I think the texture could’ve been improved if I’d been able to warm it up when I ate it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a microwave in my hotel room.




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