Hi Bake is a Hong Kong style bakery. The bakery has a clean luxurious vibe to it and staff were friendly. Their baked goods are nicely displayed. The Hi Bake box and bright pink bags are super eye catching, especially with their doggy logo on it. They support pet adoption and rescue.
I must say right off the bat that their baked goods are quite stale at room temperature. My initial impression when biting into each pastry was "man, this is not good and definitely not worth the price." However, I decided not to force myself to eat something that wasn't pleasurable, so instead, I took it home. At home, I popped the pastries into a toaster over and wow, what a difference it made. Not only was it warmed up, but the pastries were nice and pleasantly flaky. This changed my experience greatly.
1. Raspberry Cinnamon Roll (3/5)
This roll is basically layers of puff pastry that's coated with cinnamon sugar and topped with whipped cream and a fresh raspberry. Between the layers, there's raspberry filling, which kind of tasted like artificial raspberry flavoring. Overall, this pastry had a decent cinnamon flavor, had nice crispiness, but it was too dry.
2. French Custard Egg Tart (4/5)
I've had a lot of Chinese, Hong-Kong and Portuguese egg tarts in my life and Hi Bake brings their own unique twist to the egg tart world.
First off, their egg tart custard is very eggy and by that I mean, you can smell the egg yolk smell as you are eating the tart. If you like eggs like me, you will not be bothered by this, but if you are not a fan of eggs, this can be off-putting. The custard part is quite dense, while the tart crust part has that same layered pastry effect that they seem to use throughout all their pastries, which makes it light & flaky.
3. Dubai Chocolate Egg Tart (3.5/5)
Basically the same base concept as the original custard egg tart, but just "pistachio" flavored custard. I did not taste any pistachio flavoring within the custard part. It was just dyed lightly green and had that same rich eggy-ness like the original egg tart. It is topped off with a dollop of chocolate and Kadafi. The chocolate part was minimal, so did not contribute much to the overall flavor profile. The tart crust was stale at room temperature, but became nice and crispy after I toasted it at home. Overall, I was quite surprised they pulled this off as a tart and I was glad that it was not too sweet.
4. Pistachio Snail Roll (2.75/5)
This is a spiral shaped pastry that is more similar to a Danish. It is topped with a layer of light glaze and a generous amount of crushed pistachios. Both the pastry and pistachio pieces were stale upon first biting into it at room temp. However, after heating in a toaster oven, the pastry and pistachio bits became crispy. The pastry part had a subtle artificial pistachio flavoring to it.
5. Truffle Mushroom Croissant (4/5)
This is a flat croissant filled with truffle mushrooms and topped with a generous amount of grated cheese. You have to toast/warm this up for the cheese to be melty and the croissant to be flaky & enjoyable. I liked that that truffle flavor was strong and the mushrooms were fresh.
Overall, I give this place a 3.5/5 for its unique pastry flavors and concepts. I personally feel they really need to work on their ingredients/freshness as their pastries are really quite stale at room temp, even if it's supposedly fresh out of the oven... not sure why this is the case. They have potential though. read more