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JiWoo Bake, a Menlo Park pop-up bakery, is selling canelés with classic and Asian-inspired flavors including vanilla, matcha, pistachio and sesame. The French pastry is popular in South Korea for its caramelized shell and custard-like interior.
Jing Sek, the owner of JiWoo Bake, said the first canelé she ever tried was her own. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sek was living in Madison, Wisconsin. She couldn’t find good pastries in the area and couldn’t travel to Korea to try canelés due to the pandemic, so she decided to bake them herself.
Sek began experimenting with pastry recipes, making many attempts to perfect the challenging process of baking canelés.
“Baking is a science,” she said. Her prior experience as a pharmacist helps her with the precision and the mixing of formulations that are involved in both baking and pharmaceuticals. A slight change in temperature can drastically affect the results of a canelé, she added.
Making canelés is a time consuming process and can take up to two days. Sek said it took about three months of experimenting before she was finally able to make a perfect batch.
Seeing a finished canelé is like “opening a present,” said Sek. Until the baking process is complete, you won’t know what it looks like inside. She explained that the temperature of the milk, how the flour is mixed in and how long the batter is left to rest before baking, all affect the quality of a canelé.
Sek even traveled to South Korea for two weeks to take a baking class, where she learned from a professional Korean baker on how to make a perfect canelé. She brought all the tips she learned back to the United States to use in her business.
While living in the midwest, Sek was frequently baking for her coworkers at her full-time job working as an administrator in a cancer center. She posted photos of her baked goods on Instagram, which garnered the attention of the community and led to the start of her small business in June 2024.
But soon after, Sek and her husband moved to the Bay Area in September, where she had to relaunch JiWoo Bake in a new city and state. She currently works out of a commercial kitchen in Menlo Park.
Every month, Sek releases a set of flavors for customers to preorder and pick up from the kitchen located on Gilbert Avenue in Menlo Park and from the Mega Mart parking lot in Sunnyvale. Her rotating flavors include chocolate, pistachio, vanilla rum, salted caramel, black sesame and more.
JiWoo Bake is run solely by Sek, who starts baking for her orders at 6 a.m. every Saturday. She limits her preorders to about 120 per week and she frequently sells out.
Sek is mainly focused on selling canelés and experimenting with different flavors, but she will occasionally add new pastries to her menu. She recently introduced financiers and French almond cake to her seasonal menu, and will be adding Korean salt breads at the end of February.
Korean salt breads are a “unique twist on traditional bakery offerings, loved for its savory, lightly salted crust and soft, fluffy inside,” said Sek.
Customers can order a box of four canelés for $24 including one of each flavor or a box of six canelés for $36.
On Saturday, Feb. 8, JiWoo Bake will be hosting its first pop-up event from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Telescope Coffee located at 345 Sixth Street in San Francisco.
For more information, JiWoo Bake can be found on Instagram at @jiwoobake_.
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