Tai Tung Bakery

This review is wayyy long overdue. I came for the first time about five years ago. I’m in Toronto, and I’m eating one of their phoenix cookies (or little chicken cookies in Cantonese) as we speak.
I remember their preserved egg pastry was lovely. The inside was creamy and delicious. The preserved egg was as fresh as a preserved egg can be (this sounds incredibly ironic). There was a slight bit of ginger in there that balanced off the richness of the preserved egg.
I also distinctly remember that their walnut cakes are to die for. I had one fresh out of the oven and it was soft, moist and oh so pillowy. I talked to one of the bakers. He said it had something to do with the oven’s top heat and bottom heat and changing them to get the cake to the right consistency. That’s some fancy stuff. It’s been five years since this walnut cake, and I have yet to have one better than this one.
Onto the present. Their phoenix cookie. It was shipped over to my family from Hong Kong. The cookie has a nice chew to it, isn’t too sweet, and has a lot of walnuts in it. I love that there are a lot of walnuts. It means they aren’t skimping on the ingredients.
I’ve got two other kinds of cookies from Tai Tung Bakery waiting for me to try, but I’ll save those for another day. I wish I could have gone back on my recent trip to Hong Kong, but time and illness prevented it.
Here’s to many more years for this bakery! Hopefully I’ll be back to visit soon!

I love coming here around Mid-​Autumn festival for their traditional mooncakes. Best among all that I tried. I think they used lard, which is very fattening and makes it super good. Consuming lard once a year won’t kill me, right?

One of the oldest Chinese bakeries in HK, it is the only one and the last one where everything is still made and baked on the premises. Unlike other long lived bakeries that have made themselves into chain, this gem still remains solitary. Their mooncakes (only in Aug & Sep) are still made by hand (during mooncake season they don’t sell anything else) and for this reason they have a higher than usual price tags. Their other specialties include traditional Chinese wedding pastries, cookies, and baked goods. Not to mention the everyday breads and rolls — way better than all the big names and big chain bakeries.

Tai Tung has a long history in Hong Kong. It is famous for their wife cakes and pineapple buns. They were one of the major players in getting pineapple buns recognized as one of Hong Kong’s 480 intangible cultural heritages in June of 2014.
I recently visited this famed bakery and tried their original wife cake and one that is green bean and ginger flavored. Both were warm, flaky and gooey in the middle. I loved that the original was not too sweet and had an extremely fresh flavor. The green bean and ginger was also really interesting. I liked that there was just a hint of ginger and that it wasn’t overpowering.
Because I didn’t learn until later that they were also famous for their pineapple buns during my first visit, I had to return to check them out. I bought an original pineapple bun and a Tai Tung pineapple bun. The original one was rather disappointing. It might have been that I didn’t get one that was fresh out of the oven and it was cold that day so they cooled down quicker than normal. The top wasn’t especially crispy and the bottom was actually kind of rubbery. The Tai Tung pineapple bun is interesting because it has pineapple inside! I didn’t think that the pineapple filling actually added too much pineapple flavor to the bun though. Although unique, I was also a little bit disappointed with this one.
I would say stick with the wife cake and skip the pineapple buns from here.

Yuen Long is known for wife cakes (老婆餅), which are pastries that are soft and flaky on the outside with a wintermelon flavor inside. We passed by Tai Tung and decided to try. They happened to have original wintermelon and a variety of other options. We tried the original and the green bean/​ginger flavor. They were both really good. Nice and warm. The first time I’ve tried a warm wife cake.
They have a wide variety of baked goods.
Of the different things they had, but didn’t get to try, was that they had several flavors of the preserved egg cakes (皮蛋酥) too. Will have to try it out next time.