Big China biscuit shop

Recently, while walking past Japan Home (a store that sells household essentials like a mini Daiso), I was surprised to see Chinatown's Tai Chong Kok mooncakes being sold there. They were put in brown paper carrier bags like those commonly given out by provision shops when I was young. They were the equivalent of the plastic carrier bags taken out by consumers from NTUC supermarts today. The only difference was the strings. The original ones had a two-tone twist of red and white. The last time I saw such bags were at the Museum of Shanghai Toys in Rowell Road a few years ago. I read somewhere that present-day TCK uses these retro paper carrier bags twice a year for their confectionery promotions. When I was a kid growing up in Geylang, my mom would often go to Chinatown. If she went alone or with my other siblings, I would always eagerly wait for her return; for she would inevitably bring some snacks back from Tai Chong Kok. A common snack was pak feu peang or White Powder (Cake) Biscuit. The other that I liked was kei ji peang (literally Chess Piece Biscuit). They do indeed look like Chinese chess pieces in size. It was a semi-hard biscuit that tasted like brown mooncake skin, made out of bean. Even today, I would have to stop myself from stuffing myself silly with this biscuit. Pak feu paeng had an ancient story about a lazy wife behind its origins. Because she was lazy and liked lying in bed, her husband worried she would starve when he went away out of town. So in order to prevent that, he baked a large pak feu paeng to wear around her neck. But despite his good intention, his wife still starved to death. Turns out, she was even too lazy to turn the biscuit around after eating what was in front. I believe this story was told by Lee Dai Sor over Rediffusion. Just one of the many moral tales he often told. My mom would also buy back wan pin kou, kai zhai paeng and yi zhai paeng on her trips. Wan pin kou or Cloud Slice Cake was a small white slab wrapped in pink paper. It's about the size of a large smartphone and just as slim. This rectangular snack is sliced equally in oblong strips, which made it easy for me and my siblings to tear off to eat. You can still buy this from snack racks in the coffeeshops today, but they are all mass-market produced. Too sweet and lacking in flavour and crumbling too easily. Another wan pin kou came in thick rombus shapes with two visible spots of gelatin that's either green or white. We would dip this in coffee too. The white powder was actually glutinous rice flour and sugar. It made the coffee extra sweet. Some places call this wan pin kou with the gelatin 'sui zeng kou' or Water Crystal Cake. Kai zhai paeng or Chick Biscuit was a wafer thin biscuit that packed quite a punch. It was very savory with a liquoriced flavour because one ingredient was Five Spice powder. Why, perhaps, it was wafer thin. I suspect one ate this while savouring a cup of Chinese tea. Despite its name, no bit of chicken is in it at all. It does make one wonder why. However, some new recipes do include chicken stock to make it even more flavourful. Apparently in Malaysia, you can find both thick and thin kai zhai paeng biscuits. Yi zhai paeng or Ear Biscuit on the other hand, did look like what it was called. It came in small pieces curled and depressed like shells or ears. Like kai zhai paeng, yi zhai paeng went well with black coffee. Still does. Another biscuit that goes extremely well with coffee is hup tho sou or Walnut Crisp Biscuit. This one is a round and oily and crumbly biscuit made with walnut. I liked it in small doses because anything more would send me to the toilet. For some reason, overly oily biscuits made me do that as a kid. Actually, all these biscuits went well with black coffee which made them such good leisure snacks when you were relaxing and having a cuppa. There is a coffeeshop in Kluang, Malaysia that does just that: Sell leisure snacks and drinks. Malaysia does have a more vibrant yum cha (tea time) culture than Singapore. No wonder the waistlines of men over there have been shooting up these past years. Another confectionary my mom would bring back was kai tan gou or Egg Tart. Usually, we simply refer to this egg tart as tan tart. At times, my mom would get them from Tong Heng. Another place she bought them from was a popular stall in People's Park Complex hawker centre, the one that faced OG Departmental Stall. Another snack she would also buy back were those giant-sized soon kueh. A lady would sell them sitting on a wooden stool from a round, grey iron pot in that open area between PPC and Majestic Cinema. Another signature cake my mom would bring back is TCK's egg cupcake or kai tan gou. They were brown in color, about two inches thick and shaped like a mayflower with slices of almond or kua chee (melon seeds) on top. And who can forget also ham cheem paeng, that dough fritter pancake that was either salty or sweet. When sweet, it is often lightly laced inside with red bean. For some reason ham cheem paeng was associated with a woman's privates; goreng pisang with the male organ. We kids would giggle and tease about it. Talking about snacks reminds me of tho chee paeng or Belly Button Biscuit. These fat little oval biscuits no bigger than your fore thumb were very popular and came in a bluish rectangular tin that was pretty sharp at the edges. I think the brand was Jacob's. For a long time, we used this tin as our sewing box. Another variation of the biscuit had a tuff of hardened, colored sugar icing on it. Interestingly, it has graduated to being use as spirit food during Hungry Ghost Festival - something you could buy even from the joss offerings shops. Another popular biscuit then were the round tins of Danish Butter Cookies. For us kids, this was the 'top end' of our biscuit world! We would scramble to choose the "assorted biscuits" typically found in each tin. Because of their small size, me and my siblings often used tho chee paeng as toy food in our play tea parties. There's also one other snack that we siblings can all agree on, and that is sart kei mah, a yellow sticky cake that's actually made up of compacted strips. It's egg based and covered in yummy sugar-maltose syrup. I understand this snack was imported from Machurian ancestor worship culture, with sart ke meaning 'cut' and ma meaning 're-arrange'. In Cantonese, sart is 'kill', ke is 'to ride', and mah is 'horse'. In HK, this snack is associated with horse racing. When you are young and with many siblings, you don't think much about the snacks you often eat. But mothers do pamper their children even though they scold and cane. Why it is good to give your parents surprise treats when they get older. In this regard, I wonder what my mom miss eating today. Maybe her favourite tan tart?