East Bay Bakehouse Goes Nationwide with Their Vegan Asian Pastries
(Little Moon Bakehouse)
When Annie Wang set out to make vegan Taiwanese pineapple cakes, she couldn’t have known there’d come a day she would be sending her plant-based pastries all over the country. That was before she launched the pop-up bakery phenom formerly known as Annie’s T Cakes, when she was working in food tech marketing. Her treats — chewy almond cookies and Taiwanese pineapple cakes — went gangbusters throughout the Bay Area, her allergen-friendly Chinese desserts sweeping the scene.
Now Wang is changing things up. Her AAPI – and woman-owned – outfit now goes by Little Moon Bakehouse. Further, Wang is shipping nationwide for the first time — and pre-orders for those big-time popular mooncakes are live in time for the Mid-Autumn Festival. This year she’s got black sesame with toasted coconut, fudge brownie and matcha chocolate chips, and two mung bean flavors, one with pineapple and another studded with hazelnuts and dark chocolate. As the fall arrives, Wang is feeling more comfortable and excited about her all-inclusive baking than ever. “The first few years I was just figuring things out,” Wang says. “This year is the perfect time to start a new chapter.”
Annie Wang (Little Moon Bakehouse)
The rebrand, complete with new smart custom boxes, took shape in perhaps classic form for someone who spent years tinkering with her recipes. Wang says she always knew she wanted to change names for the business; customers would say the name wrong (Annie’s Tea, Annie’s Tea Cakes, that kind of thing) and, frankly, it was just a name she came up with randomly one day. So she went back and forth on logos, names, colors, and vibes over and over. She even hired someone off of freelance-for-hire website Fiverr to help her pick a name. “I had Fiverr cash and I was like ‘Let’s see what they come up with,'” Wang says with a laugh. Little Moon Bakehouse, as a name, is meant to invoke Chinese folklore, which often highlights contemplative reflecting on the moon, and the peace and quiet found in a simple evening spent with loved ones.
She teamed with Kai Kwong for the rebrand, a San Jose-based designer who calls her creative studio Doll Girls. Wang says the new approach feels perfect, like a homecoming. She’s been a vegetarian for years and has always struggled to find the desserts and dishes that remind her of what she ate growing up. It’s fitting, then, that her last role she held in food tech was for a spirits company recreating whisky — and she doesn’t drink. In other past lives she was a part of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Beijing and worked as a reporter. Unsurprisingly, her first story was on 3-D printed chocolate. “I realized I could do climate work through food systems,” Wang says of her jumping into food production herself.
The vegan salted egg yolk from Little Moon Bakehouse is one of the items that put Wang’s business on the map. (Little Moon Bakehouse)
This business was a dream as early as 2017, but she’s glad she got all that experience working for bigger companies. Fulfilling the dream as Little Moon Bakehouse comes after just about four years running the business. When she first set out, she recipe tested through the summer of 2020, contributing to Asian American bake sales here and there, then got the business online for orders that fall. She began in January 2021, hitting an epic milestone in 2022. She partnered with A24 Studios to make custom almond cookies for the premier of the wildly successful film Everything Everywhere All At Once. Yes, she hung out with Michelle Yeoh. But it wasn’t until 2023 Wang was able to work on Little Moon Bakehouse exclusively. It also wasn’t until 2023 that Wang got a vegan salted egg yolk recipe down pat, reaching a point of satisfaction that elicited countless DMs asking for nationwide shipping.
(Little Moon Bakehouse)
Through it all making the Chinese pastries of her childhood accessible to as many people as possible remains the motivating force. There’s a reason she was not only okay fulfilling some 700 pineapple cake orders the first fall she began, but overjoyed. This fall she plans to unveil a few new plant-based pastries to her growing roster of nostalgic creations. After a thorough battery of testing and experimenting, of course. “It’s all been really wild,” Wang says. “I feel grateful to do something like this where I figure out ways to make the food system more sustainable but also share the foods I grew up eating.”
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