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Cathy Fan and her delectable cheesecakes.
Cathy Fan’s cheesecakes sell out almost every time she sells them. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Archi Banal)

KaiMay 27, 2023

Cheesecakes, brownies and cookies – she did it all for the mochi

Cathy Fan and her delectable cheesecakes.
Cathy Fan’s cheesecakes sell out almost every time she sells them. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Archi Banal)

Cathy Fan started baking to heal herself. Now, her designer cheesecakes and cookies are in demand all over Auckland – and beyond.

On a recent Wednesday, Cathy Fan caused a bit of a scene. The part-time baker was setting up her stall at Britomart’s regular food truck lunch event when queues of fans began forming. By the time the market opened at 11.30am, her lines were longer than any she’d seen, snaking from one side of Britomart Square to the other. 

Those at the back of the queue sent friends to the front to ask Fan about the likelihood of anything being left. She could only shrug – she was too busy packing slices of cheesecake into boxes and dealing with the sudden onslaught of customers. Organisers snapped photos. They’d never seen anything like it.

A week later, Fan giggles at the memory. “I bought 33 cheesecakes,” she says, thinking she’d over-catered for the event. She sells those for $22.50 a slice. (One slice, Fan says, is “two-to-three servings”.) Within an hour, they were all gone, as well as all of her two-packs of brownies ($18) and four-packs of cookies ($28). 

A slice of cheesecake drizzled in honey.
Cathy Fan’s pistachio cheesecake is drizzled in honey. (Photo: Supplied)

That’s become a regular experience for Fan, a full-time electrical engineer and part-time baker who operates her small bakery Fankery out of an industrial kitchen in Glendene. Since she started offering her products for sale last year, her take on upmarket bakery staples, all with her own personal twist and a rotation of flavours, have become a massive hit. 

Fan, 23, doesn’t have a permanent shop, instead preferring pop-ups, collaborations and takeovers in borrowed venues around Auckland. Recently she’s popped up in Takapuna, Parnell and Ormiston. Last weekend, her Grey Lynn pop-up sold out. If you’re hoping to attend her Slow Lane restaurant takeover in Elleslie this weekend, you’re out of luck: pre-orders for those sold out well in advance too.

Why? Her delightful Instagram page is one reason. There, she shows off gooey cookies (she recommends microwaving them for 15 seconds), layered brownies and cheesecakes that come in a variety of flavours, including matcha, oreo, lemon uzu and black sesame. The colours pop, velvety purples and gooey yellows advertising Auckland’s most sought-after treats. (It helps that they also cater to the algorithm-driven TikTok trend of everything being saucier now.)

An Oreo cheesescake with a layer of mochi in the middle.
An Oreo-infused cheesecake with a layer of mochi in the middle. (Photo: Supplied)

The main reason, though, is Fan’s use of mochi – a spongy medley of glutinous rice flour, water, sugar and cornstarch kneaded together which results in a product with the consistency of tough marshmallow. It adds layers and texture, and melts in the mouths of customers.

It is, says Fan, all about that mochi. Her most crucial ingredient is a taste of her childhood, when she grew up with her grandparents in Shanghai. It’s also the thing that helped her overcome a recent health scare. Without mochi, she wouldn’t have Fankery. In fact, she might not have anything at all.

Standing in her gleaming Glendene kitchen stirring a pot of deliberately burnt butter, with cheesecake tins stacked in one corner and trays of free range eggs piled high in another, Fan says she never thought she’d become a baker. Before Covid, she was focused on her career. She’d just started full-time employment as an electrical engineer, and she was also bodybuilding, bikini modelling and working as a personal trainer on the side.

Food was fuel and nothing more. “I weighed everything,” she says. “I tracked the micro-nutrients of carbs, fats, protein.” It was a disciplined lifestyle that meant many hours in the gym, before and after work. Often, she’d be in bed by 7pm, missing out on social events. “I didn’t eat with family. I didn’t eat with other people. And I didn’t eat out because then I didn’t know what I was eating … it’s a very lonely journey.”

A mochi-infused cookie is pulled apart by Cathy Fan.
Cathy Fan with her mochi-filled cookie. (Photo: Chris Schulz)

Once Covid hit, Fan was stuck at home, unable to go to work, or the gym. She began gaining weight, and felt miserable. When her grandfather died during lockdowns, it made things worse. She was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and says it was because of the stress of her lifestyle. “I was so fatigued. Walking up a hill was impossible.”

Sick and tired of being sick and tired, she decided to try something else. “I either stay in my room and feel sad all day, or I bake some food that makes me happy,” was her thought process. On a whim, she decided to bake cookies. She’d been craving mochi, and decided to stick small rolled balls inside her chocolate chip dough. She still remembers that first bite. “I was like, ‘Woah, this is amazing.’ It was pure happiness. It had been the longest time.”

The following day, she put mochi in a batch of brownies. “That came out great.” Then – “Don’t ask me how” – she tried it inside a cheesecake. She used her brownie mixture – that’s what the burnt butter is for – then piled layers of mochi and cream cheese filling on top. It worked. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is a new concept.'”

A strawberry cheesecake.
Fankery’s strawberry mochi cheesecake. (Photo: Supplied)

She started out gifting her creations to friends, then began selling the occasional item through an Instagram page. Word spread, orders began coming in. In November, she decided to try markets and pop-ups. Now, in her commercial kitchen, she has catered weddings, cooking up to 12 cheesecakes at a time. Even with two part-time staff, her capacity is maxed out.

Fan’s done all this while working full-time. You could often find her in her kitchen, on her laptop, juggling the two. When did she sleep? “Later than I would like,” she says. She’s taken a sabbatical from work and using this time to expand: she wants Fankery to become her full-time job, with a permanent shop rotating an expanded range of flavours. “I do want to do this full-time,” she says. “I don’t want to go back.”

That means long hours in the kitchen. Fan no longer has time for the gym, instead getting her workouts carrying pots and pans full of sauces and batters around her kitchen as she prepares for Fankery’s weekend events. The orders keep coming in, her fan base continues to expand, and there’s pressure on supplies: before chatting to The Spinoff, she’d visited several stores trying to track down a free range egg supply. She had no luck. “We use four in each cake,” she says, hence the price.

Yes, sometimes people baulk at paying $22.50 for a slice of cheesecake. Fan points to rising inflation, packaging and ingredient costs. “They don’t think about the effort that goes into it,” she says. But her happy fans far outweigh any negativity. At Britomart last week, she’d noticed a pre-order came from an address in New York. She thought it might be a mistake. But soon a woman arrived with an American accent to pick up her treats. “She’s like, ‘I’m here on honeymoon. But I saw you on Instagram and told my husband we have to try.'”

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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

KaiMay 27, 2023

Crunchy, spicy and delicious: Seven Indian snacks you need to try

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Beyond that bland bag of supermarket bhuja, an exciting new snacking world awaits.

In 2002 when we moved to Auckland, my mum’s favourite shop was the lonely old Moshim’s Indian store near Pakuranga Plaza out east. It was the only place that sold the spices and ingredients she needed to recreate home in a faraway land.

We went there every fortnight. While Mum would be busy filling up plastic bags of various spices from the big bulk bins, I would take a stroll in the snack aisle. There was everything from the Parle-G biscuits I grew up dunking in my milk, to bhel puri, to my favourite mini samosas (very different to the large Punjabi samosas), all squeezed in next to one another.

Money was tight so I dared not ask Mum to buy me the $6 Frooti mango drink I coveted. But I knew that if I walked around in the aisle long enough and stared longingly at the packets I could emotionally blackmail her into buying a packet of chakli or suji rusks to have with chai.

Twenty years on, Indian ingredients are easier to find but the snack aisle at my local Indian shop remains my favourite place to go when I have the munchies. If you’re a bit tired of eating salt and vinegar chips, here are seven savoury Indian snacks you must try.

Freshly made chakli (Photo: Getty Images)

Chakli

Perfect instead of biscuits

I have a friend who simply must have two chakli every evening. Chakli is a spiral-shaped snack made with rice flour, chickpea flour, cumin and sesame seeds that originates in west India. It enjoys peak popularity during Diwali where it’s often made fresh by grannies and packed as part of the Diwali Faral (snack) gift box that families exchange with one another. You need special equipment and a patient mindset to make chakli at home so I suggest you just buy them instead.

Masala moong dal

Perfect with drinks

You might’ve cooked with yellow mung lentils and know they’re quite delicious. These are their naughty cousin that parties too much. Moong dal namkeen flooded the Indian market in the late 1990s and everyone loved this simple salty snack. It’s a family favourite – kids love it because the tiny dal stick to their fingers and adults I know eat it by the tablespoon as a salty accompaniment to whisky or beers. High-protein snack, anyone?

Banana chips

Perfect with chai

You get banana chips in supermarkets but they taste nothing like their zingy Indian relatives which come seasoned with dried mint, black pepper and salt. A popular snack from south India, banana chips may dubiously be counted toward your 5+ a day if you disregard the oil they’re fried in. Their thin and crunchy texture pairs wonderfully with a hot cup of chai.

Monaco Cheeselings

Cheeselings

Perfect for kids

Made by a popular Indian snack company Parle, Monaco Cheeselings are easily spotted by their signature yellow and red box. Made of flour, butter and cheese, these small, salty, cheesy squares are highly addictive and a hit with my kids who don’t like spice. Their melt-in-your-mouth quality makes them a dangerous yet tasty choice for your next binge-watching session.

Sev

Perfect as a crispy topping

The most basic definition of sev is deep-fried savoury strings made of chickpea flour (note that sometimes it also goes by the name bhujia). You’ll find many types of sev ranging in thickness and flavour; I particularly like garlic sev or methi (fenugreek) sev. While you can eat fistfuls directly from the packet, I like to use it as a topping on any boring food – like a curry I need to finish eating or even some leftover stir-fry thing. Street food vendors that sell the famous Mumbai sandwich use sev as a garnish on top and I reckon it would taste awesome on some sort of pork taco thing too.

Fenugreek khakra (Photo: Getty Images)

Khakra

Perfect as a healthier snack

A running joke in India is that the Gujarati community take their packets of khakra with them everywhere they go. Made from wheat flour, khakra is essentially a roti rolled out very thin and then roasted until it’s crispy. They are one of the few snacks that are not deep fried and therefore a favourite with Indian dietitians who are trying to wean their clients off the 5pm munchies. Your local Indian shop will likely have khakras in all sorts of flavours. Start with the plain ones if you’re averse to spice and level up to the pani puri khakras slowly. I highly recommend the Induben brand.

Murmura (puffed rice) chivda

Perfect for making on a rainy day

There are many different kinds of chivda including the classic poha chivda that includes flattened rice, peanuts and spices, and corn chivda which incorporates corn flakes, nuts and spices. Other types of chivda may feature ingredients like sev, lentils, raisins or other dried fruits, creating a mix that’s sweet, savoury, crunchy and spicy almost all at once.

My favourite type of chivda is the one I make at home. To make it yourself you’ll need plain salted puffed rice which you dry roast in a pan or pop into your air-fryer for a couple minutes. Meanwhile, make a tempering of oil, mustard seeds, curry leaves, peanuts, finely chopped garlic, turmeric and salt. Mix the hot oil onto the puffed rice and you’re done.

There are so many other Indian snacks like gathia, shakarpada, bhakarwadi, dry fruit samosa and kachori that didn’t make the cut here but I suggest you try those too. The easiest way is to promise yourself you’ll never leave an Indian shop again without a pack of Haldiram or Kemcho snacks again!