Growing up in Changi Airport with a cabin crew manager mum, Chanel Li always thought she would grow up to be in the aviation industry — either that or a teacher.
However, becoming a café owner was never on the cards for Ms Li, who had just joined a new airline when flights were grounded worldwide in 2020.
Besides following Chloe Ting’s workouts, Ms Li turned to baking to pass the time, but the demand for her invention – orh nee tarts – proved so popular that she opened a kitchen to meet it.
Then, even a kitchen wasn’t enough, as Ms Li wanted to reach more people through walk-ins.
Today, Cafe Lilac by Whisking Bakes is located in central Singapore and offers not only her famed orh nee cakes and tarts, but also coffee and hot food.
Perhaps her unexpected life path isn’t entirely surprising, though, as she told MS News — the 25-year-old has always preferred unpredictability, even back when she was a flight attendant.
In future, however, she hopes she can enjoy a simple life overseas and bake only when she wants to. As much as Ms Li enjoys her current work, she isn’t actually a fan of how fast-paced everything in Singapore is.
Like many Singaporeans, Ms Li’s life was changed irrevocably when Covid-19 spread globally, grinding the aviation industry to a near-complete halt.
The timing was especially unfortunate as she was about to join Japan Airlines as a flight attendant right after leaving Scoot, where she had worked for a year.
Source: Instagram
Things were still confusing and uncertain. Ms Li’s roster used to be filled with flights, then half, then none entirely.
With no way to continue flying, she turned to baking, and somehow it became popular enough that she started a home-based business, Whisking Bakes.
But it was never going to be a full-time gig. “It was something to last me a month or two, then go back to flying,” she said.
Then came Chinese New Year 2021, when Ms Li was thinking about something special she could do for the festivities. She felt that pineapple tarts were too familiar, and wanted to bake a unique flavour.
While talking to her friend, she discovered a growing new trend.
“[My friend] was really into taro, and [she said] home bakers were selling taro-based cakes that were selling out very fast with long wait lists, as well as bubble tea shops with taro pearls and flavours,” Ms Li said.
“I realised, oh, taro is starting to be a trend, and it’s not just to the older generation, but the young generation is starting to appreciate it too.”
That became the inspiration for her invention — orh nee tarts. They proved so popular that she sold 3,000 of them within 10 minutes.
Ms Li knew after a while that she needed a kitchen to handle the massive orders and hire help.
In 2022, after she realised her kitchen at Tai Seng had frequent electrical overloads due to how much they were working, she uprooted to Lavender, where Cafe Lilac by Whisking Bakes is now based.
At Cafe Lilac, Ms Li mainly works on the floor, although she also helps out in the kitchen, particularly during busy periods such as lunchtime and the weekend.
Although she hires full-timers and doesn’t necessarily need to be at the café all the time, Ms Li enjoys interacting with customers.
She also enjoys how “every day is different” because there’s always a new challenge to overcome.
“I’m never sitting, unless it’s for an interview,” she quipped.
In fact, she tells MS News she is at the café from lunchtime until closing, even on the weekends when the café opens until 11.30pm. Since she’s a late sleeper, working till late doesn’t exactly bother her and her roster as a flight attendant meant she had no fixed routine anyway.
“So maybe today I will have to wake up at 8am for one flight, but then on the return flight, I have to wake up at 4am.” Then, of course, there are red-eye flights, and sometimes she’d get just one or two hours’ sleep between flights at home before she had to take to the air again.
Being able to sleep anywhere — a superpower as far as a flight attendant is concerned — did help.
Ms Li prefers such a life over working in a “mundane” office job where she is rarely challenged.
Dipping her toes into the saturated café industry came with many challenges, but one can see Ms Li relishes taking them up.
To do research, Ms Li cafe-hopped around most of the established cafés here, observing how they did their service and even noting down their coffee brands and machines.
She also talked to many other home-based business owners, mostly online, to pick their brains and get advice. Doing that requires being “shameless”, in her words, but she figures she has nothing to lose. “At most, they ignore you, lor,” she said.
She considers herself lucky that many people she met along the way were willing to provide help, and she hopes to pay it forward by helping others through her social media platforms.
Another challenge was transitioning from a kitchen selling orh nee tarts and cheesecakes to a full-fledged café, which meant having to serve drinks too.
So, Ms Li enrolled in a coffee-making course run by Common Man Coffee Roasters. She said the staff were kind and supportive when she told them why she was learning to make coffee.
“I had to know how to make coffee before setting up the bar, so that was something I had to really push out of my limits and learn.”
“It took me so long just to get latte art done decently,” she laughed. But the effort paid off as Cafe Lilac now serves various coffees and teas to accompany the food.
Ms Li also expanded the menu to serve hot food, but she was initially against the idea as she had never cooked commercially and was worried about its quality.
But the feedback she received about needing to have hot food at a café meant Ms Li had to push past that worry. Today, the café offers breakfast dishes such as sandwiches and ramyeon — food that can be prepared in their relatively small kitchen and eaten on most days.
Ms Li does lament that she is unable to offer her ‘number one favourite food’, which is truffle fries, as the kitchen doesn’t have an exhaust system.
An additional concern was the neighbourhood, where many elderly folks reside.
Keeping them in mind, prices are very affordable and don’t exceed S$10, especially food. “Otherwise, they’d walk in, say ‘so expensive’ and walk out,” she laughed.
“Throughout each stage of our growth, I kept trying to push out of my comfort zone.”
Becoming a boss didn’t exactly come naturally to Ms Li. It was a huge jump from being a flight attendant and student.
The largest challenge was learning to manage a team of workers, some of whom are close in age and may even be older.
“It’s hard to draw a line between being friendly and also having to enforce certain rules… I want staff to enjoy working here, but I don’t want them to cross boundaries, and it’s hard for me to put them up sometimes,” Ms Li shared.
As with everything else, Ms Li has been learning as she goes.
She also sometimes worries that as an owner, she needs to ensure that her full-time staff are paid even during challenging months.
However, she does prefer having these staff on hand so she can worry less about manpower when she or other staff are sick and unable to work.
Since the pandemic days of wishing she could return to the air, Ms Li has become far busier running a café daily while posting content as well.
The funny thing about content, Ms Li said, is that her most viral video was the easiest to produce. It took just five minutes to edit since they comprised a collage with captions.
Source: @chanellixn on TikTok
“I think because it was more personal — I realised that when I post content that’s more personal, people tend to react more to it,” she thinks.
“I think my life is pretty unique in the sense that I’m not doing what most people are. That’s why people find it interesting.”
She hopes to share more behind-the-scenes, as well as the costs of running a business such as hers, which many appear curious about. There are also many other things, such as licences one must apply for, and Ms Li plans to consolidate what she’s learned into some TikTok videos so others won’t have to scour the Internet as she did.
Though she no longer thinks she’ll be a cabin crew again, she doesn’t think she’ll want to spend the rest of her life running Cafe Lilac either. She sees herself doing something else or keeping the café autonomous in future.
If the latter does happen, she will likely be hands-off. “Don’t call me unless there’s a fire,” she chuckled.
In fact, her goal is to migrate to another country, build a house which she can perhaps rent out to tourists, and bake whenever she likes.
“Singapore is far too fast-paced,” she shared, and Ms Li isn’t enamoured with the idea that her life here seems to revolve around making money and hustling.
Even in cafés, people in Singapore tend to be in a rush, Ms Li observed.
Though she sometimes admits that efficiency can be good, she prefers to take things easier sometimes.
For now, she’ll have to make do with travelling to countries like Thailand or Taiwan to be more chill, but even then, she ends up thinking about ideas for her café.
But given how quickly Ms Li’s life changed from flight attendant to café owner, perhaps only time will tell if her life will take another turn and she ends up doing something else.
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Featured image by MS News. Photography by Iskandar Rossali.
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