“We had packaging in all the spare
cupboards. We had packaging under
the couch,” she says. “It was driving
me and my husband crazy.”
Any other partner and Lo would have
been able to appease them with pralines
and bonbons, but not her husband:
“He’s a type-1 diabetic,” she says. “It’s
one of those things that everyone says
is so ironic, because I work in a field of
sugar and he can’t process it properly.”
What began as a project that used
up to five kilograms of chocolate a month
is now churning through a tonne a year.
And where the business was once more
cake-focused, Lo’s interest has slowly
shifted to chocolate. “It kind of exploded
over the last four years,” she says.
Customers have particularly taken
to Lo’s creative use of Asian flavours.
Her pandan, coconut and lychee chocolate
block draws on her family’s Malaysian
background, for example, while Japanese
touches (like yuzu with ginger and apple,
or genmaicha in the Oreo-and-strawberry
chocolate block) are linked to the years she
spent in Yokohama as a child, where her
dad worked as a satellite engineer.
One range even evokes dining at a
sushi train: there’s a salty-sweet soy sauce
block made with freeze-dried soy flakes;
a dark chocolate block given heat with
wasabi; and another flavoured with
freeze-dried pickled ginger.
Her imaginative approach has paid off,
too: her genmaicha, Oreo and strawberry
block landed silver in its category at the
Sydney Royal Chocolate Show in 2018,
and her wasabi block, and her yuzu,
ginger and apple flavour, scored bronze.
Lo’s collaboration with data-visualisation
company Small Multiples,meanwhile, was
longlisted for the Information Is Beautiful
Awards. Their project, called Not a SingleOrigin, saw Lo translate Census statistics
into chocolate flavours representing
Sydney suburbs. Greenacre, for example,
which has a large Lebanese community,
was expressed as a date, rosewater and
pistachio praline, while Westmead’s
Indian population was represented
with a chocolate flavoured with cashew,
cardamom and coconut. The entire
range sold out in two days, and more
than six months later, Lo still gets
asked for it.
Lo’s Face Bark also reflects the
community, albeit in a more direct
way: it’s a range that allows customers
to have custom photos printed onto
white chocolate shards. “No one’s asked
for anything that bizarre yet,” she says.
“It’s dogs, boyfriends or themselves.”
Customers often send in unflattering
images of their friends (“they’re the most
hideous but best photos ever,” says Lo),
and one person even had portraits from
baby-age up to the present day emblazoned
on the bark to mark their 30th birthday.Bakedown Cakery is undergoing
its own transformation, too: Lo will
soon rebrand the business as Meltdown
Artisans, closing the cake-making wing
of the company and focusing only on
chocolate made with natural, “true”
flavours. New additions include hojicha
banana (which resembles banoffee),
as well as chilli, pineapple and cashew,
coffee sourdough, and butterfly pea
and lemon myrtle chocolates. Long-
standing favourites such as pandan,
coconut and lychee will stay, but she’ll
ditch the bright, artificial pandan paste
that’s typically used and start using
freeze-dried pandan instead.
It’s all a long way from melting
supermarket chocolate in her home
kitchen, but it’s a chance for Lo to
strip everything back and focus on
the most important thing: taste.
“Everything I do should be about
flavour,” she says.
62 Atchison St, St Leonards, NSW,
bakedowncakery.com●Jen Lo at Bakedown Cakery.
Above from left: Face Bark;
Lo flooding chocolate
moulds. Right and opposite:
bonbons from Bakedown
Cakery’s seasonal range.GOURMET TRAVELLER 79PHOTOGRAPHY ALANA DIMOU (SHOP & PORTRAITS) & ROB SHAW (BARK & BONBONS). STYLING LYNSEY FRYERS.