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