Former dance instructor Joanne Huang learnt baking out of a desire to help her baker husband. - Photo: ST
SINGAPORE: When Joanne Huang picked up baking over a decade ago, she did not expect it to become her life’s work. What began as an act of love to ease her baker husband’s workload ended up taking her to the global stage.
In July, the 44-year-old received the World Confectioner of the Year 2025 award at the International Union of Bakers and Confectioners Awards in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Although she sees herself as still a rookie in the industry, she is the first South-east Asian woman and first Singaporean to earn the title.
Back in 2014, she learnt how to bake to help out her husband, Forest Lim, 49. She watched him wake up five days a week at 2am to make curry puffs, doughnuts and egg tarts before delivering them to seven school canteens. Pregnant with their second child then, she could only help with packing and accompanying him on his delivery runs.
The couple and their eldest son, then two years old, lived in an HDB flat above Lim’s family bakery – founded in 1979 as New Generation Confectionery in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 1 – while waiting for their own flat to be ready.
Joanne Huang was awarded World Confectioner of the Year 2025 by the International Union of Bakers and Confectioners in a ceremony held in Brazil’s Sao Paulo. - Photo: ST
Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to Singapore in early 2012, after a whirlwind one-month romance with Lim, whom she met while working here as a dance instructor in November 2011. She married him in May the following year and became a stay-at-home mother here.
“It pained me to see my husband working so hard and I wanted to find some way to help him,” she recalls. Up till then, Huang, who has a certificate of study in applied foreign languages from the Overseas Chinese University in Taichung City, had worked only as a dance teacher.
With no baking experience, she suggested creating an online platform specialising in customised cakes for special occasions, which were then becoming popular. Lim handled production while she managed their Facebook marketing and orders.
“Right there and then, I knew I wanted to learn cake-making first to ease his burden,” she says.
Secret plan
After giving birth to her second child in March 2014, she took both children to Taiwan for a month in November, telling her husband she wanted to visit her family. It was a cover for her plan: an intensive two-week cake-making course at a bakery school there.
“The timing was right. My mother was able to help look after my children while I attended classes and learnt how to make cakes. I wanted to surprise my husband when I got back.”
Her first morning back in Singapore, she prepared whipped cream and decorated a cake her husband was supposed to work on. Surprised by her new skills, he supported her decision to continue attending bakery classes here and urged her to enter competitions.
She eventually worked alongside him full time.
Today, her creations – cakes, shio pan and sourdough loaves – sell out regularly.
Winning the global award in her 11th year of baking marked a milestone she had never thought was possible, says Huang, who hopes her win can serve as encouragement to younger bakers.
“I want people to know, you can be working in a neighbourhood bakery and still have the opportunity to earn global recognition, as long as you continue to have passion and believe in what you do.”
Lim says: “When she initially told me she wanted to learn baking to ease my workload, I didn’t expect her to progress to this level and excel in the field.
“She is always finding ways to improve her baking techniques and expand her knowledge, despite our daily workload at the bakery.”
Before she became a baker, Huang taught hip-hop dance to adult students in Taiwan for five years. She had picked up dancing on her own and later joined a dance group.
“I love dancing,” she says. “I don’t have stage fright. It has helped me have the confidence to take part in baking competitions.”
Baking appealed to the same creative instincts. “I like to create and try out new ideas, and see if customers can accept them.”
Joanne Huang and her husband, Forest Lim, run neighbourhood bakery Cake In Action By New Generation together. - Photo: ST
Becoming a Singapore citizen in 2017 strengthened Huang’s resolve to make baking her career. That same year, she entered her first international competition in Taiwan, creating a pineapple tart shaped like ang ku kueh and placed third.
Bread came next in 2018. “I realised that to help my husband modernise his family’s bakery, I needed to understand bread thoroughly,” she says. It took her six months to master bread-making, beginning with the basics like proofing, kneading and shaping loaves, before she started incorporating local ingredients, such as laksa leaves and curry leaves, into the dough.
Marrying trend and tradition
A major renovation in 2018 transformed their 796 sq ft heritage bakery into today’s sleek-looking shop, which was renamed Cake In Action By New Generation. The couple invested $180,000 into the makeover, outfitting it with a new four-tier deck oven and industrial cake mixers. They also consolidated their online customised cake platform and physical bakery.
One of the biggest hurdles was her father-in-law, who valued old-school loyalty to their long-time suppliers.
Huang recalls modifying their doughnut recipe using a higher-quality locally milled flour from a different supplier.
“My father-in-law questioned me on the need to use expensive flour, which cost 20 per cent more than the one he had been using for years,” she says.
The matter was laid to rest after he found that the new flour rendered well-hydrated dough, resulting in moister bakes and favourable feedback from regulars. Convinced the bakery was in good hands, he handed over the reins to the couple that year.
Today, the doughnuts ($1.20 for sugar-coated, $1.50 for chocolate-coated) sell out daily.
But some items remain unchanged. The butter cake and banana cake ($5 each) still hew to her father-in-law’s original recipes.
Her attempts to introduce sourdough to the bakery took five years to succeed. In 2019, through the Singapore Bakery & Confectionery Trade Association – where she now serves as assistant secretary-general, with Lim as president – she met a Swedish chef who shared his sourdough techniques generously.
In June 2025, he passed her a levain (fermented dough) starter that is over 100 years old, which helped her ferment new batches of dough.
Her own first attempts in 2020 failed miserably. Customers, unfamiliar with sourdough, mistakenly thought the bread had gone bad as they found it too hard and sour. After three months of poor sales and constant complaints, she took it off the menu.
She reintroduced sourdough in October this year. Her latest iteration of Sourdough Loaf ($7) uses 30 per cent levain and is made with French flour. The levain results in a moist, chewy texture, enabling the bread to stay soft for three days, though she recommends freezing it.
Since June, she has also incorporated levain into the recipes for the bakery’s doughnuts, baguettes and sweet buns, resulting in more digestible breads with a moister chewiness. Huang also launched her new shio pan range, made with levain – Original, Matcha and Sesame ($1.80 each) – in August.
Staying grounded
Her life remains centred in Ang Mo Kio, where she works and lives with her husband and their three children, aged 13, 11 and nine. She gets up every morning at 6am and is at the bakery by 6.30am, gathering and preparing ingredients for her bakes.
Joanne Huang starts work at 6.30am daily.
Her husband prepares the children for school and reports for bakery duty by 8.30am after dropping them off.
At 1pm, Huang heads home to their four-room flat to do housework as the couple do not have a domestic worker. Her day ends at 10pm after the children are put to bed.
As the bakery opens daily, they have no weekly day off. But she and her husband make it a point to take two days off monthly, which they use to run errands together.
She says their love is not built on grand gestures but simple acts of thoughtfulness, such as her husband helping to mop the floor at home or taking her for a leisurely Taiwanese breakfast at one of her favourite eateries on their day off.
“We see each other daily and spend nearly all our waking hours together, but we still get along and enjoy chatting with each other,” she says. Full-blown arguments are rare. “We always find some way to resolve any differences in opinion amicably.”
Lim says: “Having her by my side in life and in work puts my heart at ease.”
She relishes how he still issues her challenges at work. “He will ask me if I want to take on more difficult orders, such as making 3D cakes.”
She remembers an early mistake in 2018, when she forgot to add yeast to a batch of dough.
“After four years on the job, I should not be making such an error,” she says. “But my husband did not yell at me or get angry that we had to throw out all 30kg of dough. Instead, he suggested that when I prepare the ingredients, I should put the yeast at a prominent spot where I won’t miss it.”
She has no desire to work in a fancy patisserie in town. “I have never regretted my choice to work in a neighbourhood bakery. My main aim, right from the beginning, is to help my husband,” she says.
“Many of our regulars have become our friends. They buy food for us and even give us souvenirs from their overseas trips.”
“You can have lofty ideas as a baker, but at a neighbourhood bakery, being practical is key,” she says. “In the Central Business District, baked goods must be trendy to keep up with the younger working crowd. But at a neighbourhood bakery like ours, we focus on product consistency because we depend on regulars.”
But she insists on using better-quality ingredients at the expense of higher profits. “I want to use high-quality ingredients, and I am willing to earn less because my goal is to give my customers baked goods they can eat with peace of mind and feel satisfied with.”
Baking continues to surprise her after 11 years.
“When I married a baker, I never imagined becoming one myself. I still love bread as much; I eat it every morning,” she says. “It is just like my husband. I don’t get tired of him.”
Tastemakers is a personality profile series on food and beverage vendors who are creating a stir. - The Straits Times/ANN
