Home-Based Bakery Has 750-Pax Wait List For Brownies & Levain-Style Cookies

Would you wait a year and a half for a box of cookies and brownies? Well, that's the current waiting time if you want to taste the sweets from Insta-famous home-based bakery, Whiskdom. While most of us used the Circuit Breaker period for some rare downtime, Fiona Loh was pulling 16-hour work days. By day, the 28-year-old was a tech product manager for UOB. And when evening rolled around, she’d sink her hands into her side hustle: Baking.

Lots of people (like, um, ourselves) would think twice about voluntarily using what little free time they have for anything resembling work. But not Fiona. “ Baking is a passion that I developed when work stress got to me. In fact, I started back in school - it’s what I did to unwind when I was studying,” says the determined lass, who started her home-based Instagram bake store Whiskdom in 2014.

For three years, she sold her bakes on and off, but discontinued the business in 2017. Then late last year, she decided to pick it up again and ran a few small-batch bake sales of cookies and brownies, which sold out quickly.

But it was only when the pandemic broke that she realised how much she wanted to dedicate herself to baking - and just how viable it might be. “During the Circuit Breaker, there were rising orders from people who wanted sweet treats and gifts for friends. So I started looking at industry trends around the globe,” shares Fiona, whose waitlist for her bake boxes swelled to over 750 people in just a few weeks. “People are increasingly willing to spend on treats, especially in a stressful environment. I knew the demand was there.” Her friends were her initial customers, but news of her bakes quickly spread via word of mouth.

All that time spent WFH also led her to reconsider what she wanted to do. “I was thinking, do I want to be an MD one day or do something on my own? Entrepreneurship has always been something I wanted to explore. Which would I regret the most if I didn’t do?”

After mulling about it for weeks, she decided to take the leap of faith and plunge herself into Whiskdom. Within a month, she had quit her job, commissioned a new logo for the company (an adorable but mischievous-looking bunny called Flourffy) and built a website and a Telegram channel. Now in her third week of full-time business, she sells 150 boxes a week and response has been so healthy that Fiona is already planning a line of merchandise starring Flourffy.

So what sort of home-baked magic could have spawned this multi-channel fan club? While Fiona can do whole cakes and smaller bakes like tarts and cupcakes, Whiskdom focuses on decadent filled brownies and gigantic soft cookies. “Brownies and cookies give me a lot of space to get creative and inventive with new flavours,” she says. “And they’re also staples for people with a sweet tooth, like me!”

Each neat, cellophane-windowed bake box ($42) comes with three fat cookies crammed with premium ingredients and three chunky stuffed brownies, in flavours that are crowd-pleasing yet creative - and change every week. Think speculoos butter-filled brownies topped with crunchy speculoos biscuits, and Earl Grey cookies made with tea-infused dough and studded with dark Belgian chocolate chips. Each box also comes with a cute card printed with instructions on how to reheat your bakes, along with a few philosophical words of - as Whiskdom’s name suggests - wisdom. While $42 may seem rather steep for six cookies and brownies, know that island-wide delivery fee is included in the price.

The boxes sell out in seconds though, so if you can’t get your hands on one, you can put your name on Whiskdom’s waitlist. Fiona saves 10 slots for waitlisters every week. Which, er, means that if you put your name on the list now, you can get your box in just under a year and a half. (The diligent baker is hoping to scale up capacity soon, so she can fulfil more orders.) Are they that good? Well, after eating a box we became waitlister #751.

While Fiona has no formal culinary training (“YouTube is my teacher!”), she worked part-time for a year in the now-defunct but super popular Maple & Market bakery back in 2014, known for its creatively flavoured cakes. And she obviously has talent. Her Original Chunky Chocolate Chip Cookie reminds us of those from New York’s Levain Bakery - they’re soft, slightly cakey and best eaten warmed, so the massive chocolate chips melt and ooze out when you bite into them.

We didn’t expect the Earl Grey Raspberry Cookie to be a hit since we’re not huge fans of either Earl Grey or raspberry, but this turned out to be one of our favourites, with its lightly floral-tasting dough and tart Valrhona raspberry fruit couverture centre - rich, punchy but not cloying.

Of the brownies we tried, the Nutty Party Fudgy Brownie was our fave, with its gooey peanut core that reminded us of those old school, melt-in-the-mouth peanut cookies resembling carrom discs. Actually, all the brownies were delicious and less jelak than, say, those you get at another Instagram-hit bakery, Bundt. But we found that they got a tad dry if we left them in the fridge and didn’t eat them on the day of delivery.

Next, Fiona’s looking for a shop space to set up in. And she has no regrets swapping her cushy job to spend her days in the kitchen, up to her wrists in dough. “In banking, you just roll out [tech] feature after feature and people don’t see the effort behind it,” she muses. “With baking, there’s so much more fulfilment - you get people thanking you for what you’re doing. It brings warmth to my heart. I am more at peace with myself than ever.”

Order via Whiskdom’s IG @whiskdom, the website or Telegram @whiskdomsg. Pre-orders for Wed-Sun open every Mon at 7pm. Islandwide delivery is free; no pick-up is available.