Jelly cake enthusiast creates incredibly lifelike flower decorations and spreads the word in Hong Kong about the craft, popular in her native Malaysia and Singapore

Siamy Tan only recently got into jelly cake making, popular in Southeast Asia, but her edible designs were a hit on Instagram and she’s started holding classes

Using a modified hypodermic needle she sculpts in jelly flowers so lifelike they look real. Her secret to success? ‘Practice, practice, practice,’ Tan says

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Andrew Sun

Published: 12:45pm, 21 Jul 2022Updated: 3:02pm, 12 Sep 2023

A lot of Instagram bakers are easily impressed when they make a pretty cupcake, but Siamy Tan is taking dessert design to another level.

Malaysian-born Tan is personally reviving the lost art of decorating jelly cakes – cakes where coloured agents are injected into a clear layer of jelly and sculpted into an edible design.

From colourful flowers and petals to koi fish, the possibilities in her three-dimensional canvas of translucent gelatin are endless.

According to her, the trick is to master the art of “jelly jabs”, Tan’s own term for the process of shaping designs into clear jelly with a modified hypodermic needle.

It was very tough to start. At first, I was making two to three cakes every day and running out of fridge space. Everybody was complaining

Siamy Tan

“I knew about this art for a long, long time, probably over 30 years,” Tan says of jelly cake making, which is prevalent in Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.