Hiap Joo banana cakes ($8 per box)!
Hiap Joo Bakery banana cakes — $8 per box. The iconic Johor wood-fired bakery, finally available in Singapore via resale during the border closure.
Friday morning snack — Hiap Joo banana cakes at $8 per box. The iconic Johor wood-fired bakery’s banana cakes, finally available in Singapore via local resale during the border closure.
We ordered:
- Hiap Joo banana cake box — $8
Hiap Joo Bakery is the legendary Johor Bahru bakery that’s been baking banana cakes in a brick wood-fired oven since 1919. The bakery is the kind of generational family business that defines Southeast Asian food culture — same recipe, same oven, same family running it for three generations. Pre-pandemic the only way to get the cakes was to cross the border to Johor; phase 2 had created a Singapore resale market because the border closure made the original route impossible.
The banana cake itself is the soft, moist, brown-crust variety. Made with ripe bananas (the very ripe, almost-black-skin variety with maximum sweetness), butter, eggs, sugar, and flour. Baked in the wood-fired oven gives the cake a distinct smoky-toasted note that you can’t replicate in a regular electric or gas oven.
This box was the proper Hiap Joo product. The cakes had the right colour (golden-brown crust with a dark base), the right texture (moist crumb that holds together but doesn’t go gummy), and the unmistakable wood-fired aroma that signals the genuine bakery rather than a knock-off.
The banana flavour was the headline. Real ripe banana taste comes through in every bite — not the artificial banana flavouring that some banana cakes lean on, but the actual fruit sugar concentrated through the baking. The slight smoky note from the wood-fired oven complements the banana sweetness without overpowering it.
Each box typically contains 8-10 small banana cakes, each one a couple of bites worth. The portion is designed for sharing or for eating across multiple days.
At $8 per box this is fair Singapore-resale pricing. The original Hiap Joo price in Johor is closer to RM 18-20 (which converts to roughly SGD $5-6 at 2020 exchange rates), so the Singapore resale carries a small mark-up to account for the cross-border logistics — but the border closure had eliminated the original logistics path, so the mark-up reflects the courier-based replacement.
We distributed the box across the family — kept some, shared some. Phase 2 had reshaped the food logistics in unexpected ways, and the Hiap Joo banana cake resale was one of the small benefits.
Overall: 4.5 / 5. 😋👍🏼 Excellent Hiap Joo banana cake — would re-order during the border closure.
