by Janine Sato
Do you remember Aki’s Bakery nestled on Jackson Street in San Jose Japantown? Or maybe you are more familiar with the larger Meridian Avenue location? Either way, you won’t have the firsthand memories of Darryl Tom who grew up in his Ji-chan and Bachan’s store. His elementary years consisted of “helping” at the bakery by consuming the chocolate shavings and eclairs. Either that, or he was running errands with his Ji-chan between the Jackson and Meridian site with a Foster’s Freeze chocolate dipped cone in hand. It was a tough job However, the toughest part was being a non-cake person in a family business that…well…specializes in cakes.
Flash forward to present day, where I had the privilege to sit down with Darryl and his mom (Penny) at their mini pop up on Saturday March 2nd, hosted by Cake Expressions in Santa Clara. Darryl, now married with a 2-year-old is taking his eating responsibilities to the next level. After lots of conversations with his wife and the support of his family, he’s dusting off the recipe books and paying tribute to his Ba-chan Suyeko by creating Sue’s Bites and Delights.
Q: What was your favorite dessert at Aki’s Bakery?
Darryl: Honestly, I don’t like cake [laughs]. I really liked ice cream cake as a kid. I would ask for an ice cream cake for my birthday over an Aki’s Bakery cake. But I did really like the eclairs! The fun part, is now I get to make the things that I like (with some modifications).
Q: That’s so funny that you aren’t a cake person. How did you even begin to start up the business?
Darryl: It really was a late-night idea that I couldn’t get out of my head. I decided to talk about it with my wife. I also asked my mom if it was a valid idea. We had all the recipes, but we needed to figure out how to scale down. Figuring out how to convert recipes that called for 60 lbs. of sugar…it was a lot of trial and error.
Penny: Yeah, we would taste test for him. Too tart, too sweet…the cake not light enough. We’d tell him. He did really great on perfecting the glaze! We even went around the Bay Area to taste test the competition. We needed to see what was out there. We tried tomake it a blind tasting, but it was pretty obvious.
Darryl: I really wanted to see what the customers enjoyed. We wanted to use the same ingredients as before, but there are things that we had to modify based on the availability of ingredients in the past versus the present. It was interesting, we ended up finding out that the guava glaze was based off preference. See, I like things on the tart side. And my mom likes thing on the sweeter side. We asked people and we found that younger people tended to like the tarter, more natural guava flavor, versus older folks who liked the sweeter, more artificial flavor (closer to the original Aki’s recipe). We ended up meeting in the middle. Another problem with the guava, was that we also realized that the ripeness of the fruit was also dependent on the flavor. The recipes didn’t tell us what to do if the batch of guava that we got was more tart or more naturally sweet.
Q: It’s exciting to hear that you’ll be at Nikkei Matsuri this year. What will you be selling?
Darryl: It’s kind of a last-minute decision. We usually kind of decide the menu a couple of days before the event. We usually offer the guava cake, the lemon cake, a chocolate cake with a really light chocolate flavor, and the brownies.
Please support Darryl and his family’s new endeavors as he pursues his small pop-up
and pre-order business!
For more information about Sue’s Bites and Delights, please check out their website at
www.suesbites.com where you can join their mailing list and follow them on Instagram @suesbites.
You can look forward to seeing them at the upcoming San Jose Nikkei Matsuri Festival on April 21st, 2024, near where the old Aki’s storefront used to be in the middle of Jackson Street.
