Hey Hive!
We're back with more of our hawker adventures! It's been a while but one of the things we do on dates is trying out different stalls in different hawker centers to find which are our favourites!
This was back in May 2025, when my job at the time basically forced me to go to a different place because the whole company shifted locations. It was a little more inconvenient but on the plus side, it gave us a chance to try out some different food stalls!
This time we went to Bukit Timah Food Centre since it was just opposite from my workplace and apparently there are quite a few famous stalls here!
Source: danielfooddiary
It's not the easiest food centre to get to but it's still pretty close to the Beauty World train station. I think they underwent some renovations in recent years so everything looks quite modern and cleaner compared to how it was previously.
There are actually quite a few stalls here that looked pretty good.
There were even some pretty fancy looking stalls like this bar called Thatsmybrew.
Anyway, the stalls we tried was this one called He Zhong Carrot Cake which I think is quite famous in the neighbourhood. It's a family-run business now for over 3 generations, and has been in business for over 98 years now!
So while we were here we just had to try it! We heard their stall normally has long queues so we were pretty lucky there wasn't one that day.
They only specialise in white carrot cake, which if you're not familiar is a popular hawker dish that doesn't actually have carrots but is made of stir white radish (daikon) cake cubes, eggs, garlic, and preserved radish (cai poh). It's savoury and tasty but can be sweet with black sauce (i.e. the black version).
This stall however, only specialise in the white version of carrot cake, which is more savoury and my personal preference. We actually saw Mr Steven Teo, the current owner of the stall that day, manning the place with his daughter.
We bought a medium portion for $4.50, and while it looks simple the flavours were amazing! The eggs coated the soft radish cubes nicely and everything was fried and seasoned well. They also had a nice crisp edge to it so there was some bite and while I would've preferred some chili on the side but I think we were told there was chili already. I couldn't really taste it though so I'm not sure if they missed it on our order or not.
It was still pretty tasty without the chili but it definitely felt like we missed something. It was a little unfortunate but it was alright.
For dessert, we decided to try this stall nearby specialising in Penang style Nyonya Chendol.
This stall is also very famous, being the first Cendol Stall In Singapore with a Michelin Recommendation! I think they were featured in the Michelin food guide for Singapore, and has now become the place for cendol here.
If you've never heard of cendol, it's an iced dessert featuring green, worm-shaped rice flour or mung bean jelly noodles, coconut milk, and gula melaka (palm sugar) syrup. It's slightly sweet, but very refreshing on a warm day, which is basically every day here in tropical Singapore.
I think the special thing about this cendol is that their mung bean noodles are handmade with a secret recipe. It was very smooth and had a slight chew to it that complemented the crunch of the shaved ice. It was really refreshing but honestly with how warm it was it didn't last very long since the ice melts so quickly.
Not even 5 minutes later it was basically reduced to a cold dessert soup but it was honestly still really nice. The crunch wasn't there anymore and it was more diluted but the jelly noodles were still good, and the soup was sweet from the gula melaka and the coconut milk.
This stall has multiple locations but He Zhong Carrot Cake only has one outlet I believe. I'd recommend these if you're in the area but I don't think I would go out of my way to buy them. It's still really good though!
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
