She never set out to become a baker. That wasn’t the plan at all.
It started with something small and a little uncomfortable — cutting back on gluten while navigating acid reflux, and hunting for snacks that worked better for her. So she started fiddling around in her own kitchen in Buangkok, figuring it out as she went. No grand vision, just a woman trying to feel better and getting curious along the way.
The first batch wasn’t even meant for anyone but her family — cookies for Hari Raya, baked just to be enjoyed at home. Then her son took a bite. “These are really good,” he said. “You should sell them, Mom… and make some money!” A friend said something along the same lines not long after. Two nudges, and a small thought slowly turned into a small business: Not Round.
Even the name is honest about what it is. She doesn’t try to make her bakes look perfect — never has. “I like that they look homemade,” she says, “because they are.” No pretending, no polish for polish’s sake. Just cookies that look like someone actually made them by hand, because someone did.
Take Meteorite, her current bake. It started as one simple idea — a small, bite-size chocolate soft cookie made with a gluten-free flour base — and then a bit of curiosity crept in. What if she folded in black roasted sesame? What if she tried that brown butter method she’d stumbled across online, just to see what it would do to the flavour? From there it was batch after batch, small tweaks to texture and sweetness, tasted and re-tasted, until it finally passed the only panel that really mattered to her — her own family, nodding in approval.
That’s more or less how she runs the whole thing. Unhurried. A little stubborn about getting it right. Always willing to try one more small change. “Even small changes can make a significant difference,” she says about working with gluten-free flours — and honestly, it sounds like something she believes about more than just the flour.
If you ask her what’s been hardest, it’s not the baking. It’s being seen at all — squeezing in social media and consistency around a full household and another commitment on the side, with barely enough hours left in the day. She doesn’t have a clever fix for it. She just keeps going, one step at a time, and figures the rest out as she goes.
She’ll tell you, plainly, that she’s an introvert. Putting her own work out there — asking near-strangers to actually try it — has never come naturally to her. Which is exactly why, when she thinks about what she’s proudest of, it isn’t a product or a sale. It’s simply that she started Not Round at all, in a place that wasn’t even her hometown.
There’s a moment she keeps coming back to. She once asked a customer for a quick review — nothing fancy, just her honest thoughts. Turned out there was nothing left to review. The cookies were already gone, eaten a little too happily and a little too fast for the customer to remember to write anything down.
Ask her where Not Round is headed and she won’t pretend to have it all mapped out. She’d rather let it grow at its own pace and see how far that takes her. If it does end up somewhere bigger one day, she says she hopes she’ll be ready.
Her advice to anyone sitting on the same kind of small idea she once had?
“Just start. Give yourself the chance to try and see where it takes you.”