The granddaughter of "Queen of Cakes" Maria Lee Tseng Chiu-kwan, who established Maria’s Bakery in Hong Kong, is keeping the family baking tradition alive with her dessert bar and café Lashings in Wellington, New Zealand. She shares the food she misses most from Hong Kong
Like so many successful businesses, Jackie Lee Morrison’s bakery Lashings came about organically. From baking at home, to an online-only platform specialising in single-origin chocolate brownies, she then started trading at two markets, introducing special flavours on a rotating basis. A following developed and in 2018 she took part in the city’s annual food festival, Welly on a Plate, with a pop-up ice cream brownie bar over two nights.
“It was insane. I remember baking hundreds of brownies, making ice cream and toppings and feeling like the event was going to flop and nobody would come,” she remembers. “Half an hour before the event opened, there was a massive queue outside, and people were queuing consistently for the whole evening. The next day it happened all over again. It was a huge milestone and the first moment where I thought that this weird little business of mine may actually be worth something.”
Three weeks later Lee Morrison opened a permanent premises, Lashings, a dessert bar and café that’s open late. Famous for those brownies that put Lee Morrison’s whole journey in motion, Lashings is also loved from its Ice Cream Brownie Bar, where guests choose a warm brownie of choice that is then finished with ice cream, unlimited sauces and toppings. Other signature treats include its SoNuts (sourdough donuts) with weekly changing flavours, iced cinnamon rolls, and cheese scones with a homemade hot sauce glaze.
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Lee Morrison didn’t expect to be running a cult bakery in Wellington, New Zealand, but that’s not to say she didn’t have all the tools to do so, having attended culinary school and spent time working in some of London’s leading professional kitchens including Claridge’s Hotel, Chiltern Firehouse and Galvin La Chapelle.
“I had always insisted that I was more of an intuitive chef than a pastry chef,” says Lee Morrison. “But when I went to culinary school I completely fell in love with the precision of pastry. I ended up working my way through London's five-star hotels and fine-dining scene, which wasn't really the plan, but it was a fantastic learning experience. One of my favourite things to do is to laminate pastry by hand, because I just find it to be so incredibly satisfying. My grandmother is particularly pleased that I appear to be following in her footsteps!”
Lee Morrison’s grandmother, Maria Lee, established Maria’s Bakery in Hong Kong in 1966, at one point overseeing an empire of bakeries in Hong Kong and Taiwan with franchises in North America. Today, outposts of Maria’s Bakery can still be found across Hong Kong, with the most recent addition the new 1966 Baking Alliance concept in the revitalised Central Market.
The last time Lee Morrison visited Hong Kong was pre-pandemic to celebrate her grandmother’s 90th birthday, and she would have continued to return annually had Covid not kept her away for the last few years. “Hong Kong has some of the best food in the world,” she says. “You can find pretty much anything you are looking for.”
Related: What To Eat & Drink At The Revitalised Central Market