Chef Janice Wong has a new pastry wonderland

SINGAPORE — It’s one thing to appreciate art from a distance. It’s quite another to get up-close and interactive, especially when the art in question involves chocolate. Yes, chocolate paint — in 38 shades including duck-egg blue and a deep plum — is part of award-winning Singaporean pastry chef Janice Wong’s new offering in the dining scene.

The 28-year-old recently launched Janice Wong, her eponymous roving sweets shop currently moored at Gardens By The Bay’s Christmas Wonderland until Dec 21. It moves to a new space in ION Orchard on Dec 22 for about three months. Wong, who is best known for setting up 2am:dessertbar in 2007, said this new sweets boutique is the fruition of one of her long-time dreams.

“I’ve always wanted to build a renowned brand of pastries that people can easily understand and which would last forever,” she explained. “But I’m still an artisan and like to do things by hand.”

The smaller set-up of a pop-up boutique allows Wong and her team of eight to do just that — they paint every single chocolate bonbon and marshmallow (“so no two are ever the same”) or form light-as-air mochi by hand. The quantities are kept small, so she can “get close to my customers and see how they react to the sweet”.

Indeed, it is apt to think of Janice Wong the boutique as a pastry wonderland, where marshmallows resemble pristine white canvases swished with coloured “paint” and eclairs are daubed with pink or yellow frosting and crowned with popcorn or multi-coloured chocolate discs. There are chocolate balloons and kites, spherical cakes and lollipops. And if you fancy playing with chocolate, there is also that range of edible chocolate paints in flavours such as green mango, passion fruit and smoked chocolate.

But it’s more than just having fun with chocolate. One of Wong’s goals with this new venture is, in her own words, to make eclairs the next big thing. “My work is always rooted in the classics, which I then reintroduce in new ways,” she enthused.

Her eclairs are not only novel — with flavours such as peanut butter caramel, tiramisu, chocolate truffle and popcorn — but are also anchored by unimpeachable technique. The choux pastry, lined and baked with a layer of sable pastry, is firm and crunchy; their fillings lush in texture and flavour. They certainly don’t come cheap — priced between S$8 and S$12 for a petite-sized eclair — but are worth the splurge.

The other beauty of this set-up is the creativity it affords Wong and her team, who create a new flavour every week at her sugar-scented factory in an industrial building along Mactaggart Road. “It’s a lot of hard work. No other pastry shop in the world offers new flavours on a weekly basis. But I come here and I am happy. I don’t think I can ever get bored this way.”