New Auckland bakery Fankery opens with long lines outside the door

A bakery with a huge following online has opened its first brick-and-mortar shop in Auckland, and has already had lines out the door.

A queue slowly snaked around Newmarket on the sunny morning of 24 May, for the grand opening of Fankery.

The store officially opened at 9am, but some customers were there as early as 8:25am, they said it was because they anticipated a queue when it was Fankery.

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Cathy Fan is the mastermind behind the brand. She told First Up she had been looking for a permanent home for her delicious goods for a while.

"So for the past two years, I have driven all over Auckland during our pop ups. But running on a pop-up lifestyle, Fankery was still never grounded or physical in my head. I feel like it was a great way to reach people and build communities. But it was still never like a legitimate thing."

Opening her own permanent store was not something 25-year-old Fan imagined four years ago.

She had just begun a career as an engineer, and was also competing as a body builder, when her life was turned upside down by an illness.

"When I first started baking, it was actually to help me heal from my hypothyroidism, where I had gained 12 kgs in a month. I had just come out of being an amateur bikini competitor, bodybuilding, and that weight gain absolutely threw me off the rails."

But Fan did not let this life changing event get her down and soon started her own business.

Fankery now has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram.

"It was the beginning to my very own bakery. I started baking to curb my cravings after dieting for two consecutive years. That mochi burnt basque cheesecake - my bakery is now known for. Bro, it came from one of the hardest times in my life. Sharing food online took my mind away from depressing lifestyle I was in, it was something to focus on. So I baked every hour outside of my nine to five job. And now two years later, we are opening our very first door front," Fan told her followers in a video leading up to the store's grand opening.

There has been so much demand for Fan's baking that she has had to take some time away from engineering.

"Baking kind of brought a new perception on life and it was kind of me being able to show my creative side through food. I just started sharing pics of what I made online, and it just grew from there."

Her most iconic creation is a basque cheesecake with a layer of mochi at $22.50 a slice.

It's a type of cheesecake from Spain, but Cathy's added her own twist - a layer of gooey confection made from pounded glutinous rice.

"I come from a Shanghainese background, we eat a lot of glutinous rice based foods. And so anything like sticky rice, mochi, things like that, I love it. But why I put it in the cheesecake was because I don't actually like cheesecake. I just wanted to make it something that I wanted to eat. And so I was like, it can't go wrong if I try."

After leasing a commercial kitchen several years ago, finding the perfect store front has not been easy. But Fan took a creative approach and has renovated an old ticket booth in a carpark on the back streets of Broadway.

"I have been searching for a physical premise for a really long time. I've had a lot of issues with meeting landlords and them looking at me like, not really trusting me at all. And so when this place came by, it was really small, it's really small, and it used to be the parking booth of Wilson parking, so it is literally in a parking building.

"But I was like, oh my God, this is kind of cute. It's something that you walk down the street, you don't expect, but you'll be like curious about it, and you want to check it out. And I love Newmarket because I feel like, yes, Broadway is dead, but the mall is great. Everyone goes to the mall and there's a lot of parking."

Opening at the same time that many hospitality businesses are shutting their doors, Fan said she tried to stay hopeful.

"There are still business that are doing well. There are still businesses that are thriving. I think letting those dark thoughts consume you could be one route you go down. Or the other way is to think of it as positively as it's a chance for you to change. It's an opportunity for us to grow. When you have problems on how to grow, it's actually a good problem to have.

"And I'm personally very excited to get away from the pop-up life because doing it for two and a half years, there is absolutely no set schedule. Every weekend is like a super early morning wake up and I want some more stability in my life. What I want is to be able to build Fankery to be a brand that people associate with when they think Asian fusion baking."