Hoover Cake Shop    豪華餅店  

After a dinner gathering, someone brought out a Heart shaped Pandan cake for dessert.

The Heart shaped Pandan cake was from Kowloon City's Hoover cake shop.I have tried their pandan cakes before so I expected this to taste good.

The cake has two layers, there is no filling in between so the top and bottom layer can be eaten separately.

This place is famous for egg tarts but everytime I came past there was a queue.

Egg tarts are undeniably one of the best representatives of Hong Kong food. Simple as it seems but making a really high quality one isn't easy. Egg tarts are surely not difficult to find, they are basically everywhere. Yet the problem is where to find the best egg tarts.
Hearing a friend recommending egg tarts from Kowloon City, I decided to pay a visit too. As I arrived, I am glad to find that it's an old style bakery. It always seems that the old style ones serves a better quality than those of franchised. To me, this is because the old style ones actually poured their hearts into making their various food items and you can taste out and feel the effort behind.
The outside of the shop has many newpaper and magazine cuttings stuck on the glass walls. As I stepped in, I reckoned it is a fairly small shop. There are lots of shelves with a wide variety of food but has only little space to walk around. I was fortunate to have come at a non-busy hour where there were not much customers around.
I bought half a dozen of egg tarts in order to get a box. The box is flowery, sort of in a fancy way for a little girl in the old times. It does not portray a luxurious image at all as it Chinese name says. Anyway, the egg tarts are very warm, in which I believe are just out of the oven not long. It looked and smelled stunning. I immediately took one out to try after I left the bakery. The pastry is perfect, the egg custard filling is perfect, the whole egg tart is simply flawless. The pastry has sort of a crunch and fluffiness. It has a pretty distinct flavor which its strength is to the right point and won't get too over and blended well and balanced with the egg custard filling. The egg custard filling is amazingly rich and velvety. It has a really smooth texture and stunningly strong and distinct flavor of the egg too. As I know, the reason for this is that they use salted egg to make it. It is the salted egg that gave such a distinct flavor. Together with the use of cream whipped together, it then gives such a velvety and rich texture and flavor respectively.
Although it costs $5 per tart, which is not exactly cheap, it is undoubtedly one of the best egg tarts in town for me and I think it's worth it.

差差差、 令人不想再去！！！！！！！！！ THE SHOPKEEPER DOES NOT LIKE PEOPLE QUESTIONING ABOUT THE PRICE, SHE SCOLDS YOU IF YOU DO SO. THE EGGTARTS ARE QUITE EXPENSIVE TOO AND ARE NOT APPEALING FOR APPETITES AFTER THE SHOPKEEPER'S RUDENESS, ALSO, THE EGG TART STICKS IN YOUR MOUTH, NOT QUITE A GOOD EGG TART AFTER THE MANY OTHERS I HAVE SAMPLED. INCREASING PRICES ARE SO HARD TO KEEP TRACK OF. PS; IF YOU WANT A CHEAPER EGG TART, GO TO THE CHERRY'S BAKERY NEXT DOOR.

After trying out St Lolan's Egg tart in Sai Wan, I came here past this area on the same day to do other things. The last time I reviewed here my experience of the so called no.1 Flaky Egg Tart in HK wasn't very positive! Despite having that less than satisfactory tart last time around I couldn't help myself to try another 1 from here to compare to that very good one I just had earlier in the afternoon. The Egg Tarts at 豪華餅店 Hoover Cake Shop boasts of using Beijing Eggs as I mentioned last time, as well as French cream.. But does it live up to its hype?

The Pastry was undefined in layers here, too lardy yet without any lard or buttery aromatic essence. If the pastry is like that very lardy, buttery, 酥 & 鬆化 version at 新華茶餐廳 then I can accept its oiliness and lack of layers, but it isn't. To make matters worst this batch carried a substantial Burnt Taste! The Egg Custard this time also had zero eggs taste as per my last experience, but at least it didn't look as artificially orange.

VERY BLAND TASTE...
AND DID I MENTION THIS WAS STONE COLD?
EVEN THOUGH I'D POLITELY ASKED THE 'VERY RUDE' LADY TO GIVE ME A WARMER ONE? AT $4.0 A POP, THIS IS DOUBLE THE AMOUNT I PAID FOR MY EARLIER EGG TART AT ST. LOLAN'S, AND THAT WAS AROUND 500% BETTER IN TASTE. OVER-HYPED, OVER-PRICED BY A FACTOR OF AT LEAST 10 TIMES.

NEVER COMING BACK HERE TO TRY. SORRY TO SAY.

There is only so much you can say about one certain thing, or so I thought.

Hoover Cake Shop, translated in Chinese to become "Luxury". The cheaper alternative of foreign pastries will get you to this long-queue corner shop. The store space is tightly packed, where the sales ladies work with roomful of metal trays arranged neatly on shelves. Each shelf holds an array of fresh out of the oven cupcakes, tarts, and breads -- plain or wheat or with raisins. HOOVER is a staple, and inside the beating heart of Kowloon City, nobody will doubt the legendary status and how Hoover got it.

For $10 you can get three 'coconut tarts' -- you can see the red jewel-like maraschino cherry on top --no one I know ever eats that fruit, so dyed in red, as it is ever so cloyingly sweet that it makes the coconut tastes like something out from the paper shredder. Not this one. Pale golden and lumping in half-dome of a mound is the coconut filling, lightly sweet and dense at the same time. The pastry shell is toasty but buttery as well.

The legendary custard tart ($3.50 each) tastes consistently over the years. I've had one before a meal on one day, in between meals on another, and as a "dessert/ stomach filler" on another occasion. The tart shell is neither the shortbread crust nor is it flaky either. It's a cross between the two and frankly, I enjoy it a lot, with its richness in butter and a delightful crunch upon each bite, revealing a sweet wobbly custard filling the glow of shimmering gold. It's quite a sight to see a tray of new custard tarts come out of the oven and rest on the shelf -- each puffed up filling soon sink slightly in its shell, The custard filling is eggy and velvety smooth, at the same time it's denser than many custard tarts out there as well. I have had these tarts several times, and each time they don't disappoint, whether I got them just out of the oven, or been standing around for an hour or two. I always have it without the bag, as the cupping of a naked hand nests a perfectly round custard tart with ridged sides, nibbling on feeling the contrast of crisp shell and soft filling, feeling every bit of it, never wasting a crumb, be in on the paper, the hand, or even visible on the chin.

Each time at Hoover reminds me how important it is to maintain high consistency, and it's not just in business we're talking about. By constantly delivering scrumptious custard tarts, Hoover has never stopped impressing locals, whether you like custard tarts in the first place or not. Old-style bakeries like Hoover don't need the glamorous makeover in the shop, or rare ingredients and artful designs. Its modest simplicity can be, and is already a form of luxury on its own.