Breaking The Mould

Sydney’s Bakedown Cakery has won scores of fans with a fun-filled approach to chocolate-making. But for founder Jen Lo, writes LEE TRAN LAM, it’s only the beginning.

- Lee Tran Lam

When Jen Lo first began making chocolate, she used the cheapest ingredients she could find: blocks of Old Gold, Dream bars, whatever she could get at Woolworths – if it was half price, it went in her basket. She taught herself to temper with instructions on the Cadbury website and made chocolates that didn’t set properly so the ganache oozed out.

That was then. These days at Bakedown Cakery, the business Lo launched four years ago and turned into a bricks-and-mortar shop in Sydney in 2017, the chocolate is couverture, the ganache stays put, and she’s long had her tempering technique down. “I went to the Australian Patisserie Academy to do a crash course in chocolate-making and found out I was doing it all wrong,” she says. Rather than discount specials, Lo’s bonbons, blocks and truffles are now made from Callebaut, Cacao Barry and Valrhona couverture. “It’s the most expensive chocolate I’ve ever worked with – about $120 for 3 kilograms,” she says. And it tastes how chocolate should: smooth, and receptive to other flavours rather than chalky, dry or overly sweet.

For Lo, making the decision to follow a sweet career path came after years of procrasti-baking while she was working on design jobs, typesetting documents and handling stressful animation work. Lo originally launched the business from home, turning out cakes and chocolates from a council-registered kitchen. “It started in a studio apartment and then I quickly outgrew it, so I moved into a one-bedroom apartment,” she says. “Then the next year, we moved into a two-bedroom apartment, because it was taking over everything.”