The business started pre-pandemic, in 2019, when a friend approached them to make a batch of goodies for an office party. “We were making quite a variety of pastries at that time,” they say. “It was a lot of different elements and flavours, and it took quite a long time – much more time than we expected to be able to make the order, which was how we realised: OK, maybe we should focus on one thing first and perfecting it.”

The filled bomboloni were always by far the favourites, and so that’s what they chose. Today, Dough Beings offers such sophisticated flavours such as kinako cinnamon mochi, rose framboise, lemon basil meringue and even French onion gruyère – though such savoury options were at first met with scepticism, they are now strong contenders in terms of popularity. They also serve up unconventional panettone – known to pastry chefs as the “Everest of baked goods” – such as October’s pandan pineapple white chocolate flavour.

If the fun flavours and flawless execution weren’t enough (the bomboloni are amazingly light and fluffy, with gooey centres made of dreams), the aesthetic is on a par with any luxury brand’s – a product of the sisters’ obsession with art, design and beautiful branding, and the intersection of creativity and functionality.

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“Working at Lane Crawford was my first exposure of branding guidelines and how precisely it had to be kept to in order to maintain the look of luxury – how the logo is placed on the marketing materials, the size of it, the position and the colours,” says one sister. “For our own branding, we wanted it to be timeless and versatile, and we started taking photos of our food – how we wanted it to be served and eaten and served in natural light – and that inspired the direction of the photography. We also looked at how fashion brands have changed their logos towards a more minimalistic feel, but it still looks clean and sleek and has that luxury touch to it. All of these are things we personally feel very interested in.”

The storytelling is also on point: their Instagram Reels and Stories regularly delve behind the scenes of the creative process, not just in terms of the baking, but how the flavours were developed and their inspiration. And as each month Dough Beings debuts a new “collection”, there’s a considered narrative that ties the monthly bomboloni menu together: “We don’t want it all to just have creams or jams. For each collection, we curate flavour pairings of different tastes (sweet, sour acidity, earthy, bitter, savoury) and textures (creamy, rich, crunchy, oozy … in each box. We hope customers will be piqued in their senses as they enjoy the eating experience together with family and friends. We also make every flavour from scratch – it’s more laborious but enhances the taste.”

For a Richard Mille Mid-Autumn Festival gift box for VIPs, they were given box dimensions and the freedom to create a modern mooncake in their style: “That was an interesting project for us to creatively express what we thought would be a modern mooncake. We went through the whole thinking process of what it would feel like when the customer receives it, to opening that Richard Mille black box, to when they’d eat it. We wanted it to be an exploratory tasting experience that excited and inspired their palate.”

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The result was four flavours created to visually enhance and tie in with the four colours of the packaging: blood orange pistachio praline, wild strawberry rhubarb olive, Long Jing tea pineapple and chocolate hazelnut cherry, with the flavour name and each component printed delicately and discreetly inside each box “like at fine dining restaurants, where they tell you all the components in the dish, so as you’re eating it, you really get to enjoy and know what you’re eating with the mooncakes as well.”

For December this year, there is a trio of different Mont Blanc-inspired bombo, a savoury bombo option and a couple of panettone whose flavours they will crowdsource on demand, after they received many custom requests during the Christmas season in 2022. There’s only one guarantee: they’re sure to sell like hot cakes.