The tenants in the Berkeley Kitchens building have gradually transformed a sleepy street block into a culinary hub. Before closing in 2025, Standard Fare’s hearty and delectable meals were the primary reason to visit Eighth Street. Alain Shocron’s La Noisette Sweets was an added bonus, but I tended to miss the bakery’s limited retail hours. Earlier this year, Liz Khuu moved Milk Cloud Bakery into La Noisette’s space. With the addition of Bolita and Third Culture Bakery, Eighth Street now resembles a very early incarnation of Fourth Street.
Khuu has dispensed with the pastry baskets that used to line La Noisette’s front table. Instead Khuu, a graphic designer, favors minimalism. She neatly arranges two rows of food samples with small, handfolded signs. On display during a recent visit: sandwiches made with Milk Cloud’s signature shokupan; Basque cheesecakes dolloped with yuzu, coffee or hojicha; and a pineapple shokupan bun with green kaya jam ready to ooze out from its center.
Behind this front row of baked goods sit shelves of shokupan packaged in see-through bags. Khuu makes unadulterated fluffy loaves of milk bread and also flavors of the week. After she and her late husband David traveled to Japan, they discovered shokupan and sandos there. When they returned, Khuu found herself between jobs and considering what to do next. David began sending her shokupan-related reels, as a source of possible inspiration.
“I was never really in the kitchen, so I was like, ‘Maybe I should try baking it and see what he thinks,’” Khuu said. At first she wasn’t patient enough with the proofing process, and she adjusted the recipe many times before making a loaf her husband really liked. That loaf looked and tasted different from the unsuccessful ones. “The color of the dough, it was a golden-brown, not pale,” she recalled.
Khuu eats shokupan as toast and as a sandwich, and she uses it for bread crumbs. “Since bread is very versatile in general, I use it wherever I can,” she said. Her sandwich repertoire changes weekly but includes a Japanese-style keema curry, strawberry with black sesame cream, soy-marinated eggs with kewpie mayo and a teriyaki chicken sando.
Khuu’s ideas are often rooted in her personal cravings. “This week’s concept is a Japanese convenience store, kind of like Lawson and 7-Eleven,” she said. “The curry bun that I ate at a Lawson or miso soup or just fruit sandos in the 7-Eleven. I miss going to those places in Japan.”
Milk Cloud began as a pop-up. During its second year, Khuu started making Basque cheesecakes. “Customers were asking if I make cakes and I was like, ‘I don’t make cakes, but I can look into it,’” she said. David sent her Basque cheesecake reels. “There was a lot of R&D that went into creating them,” Khuu said. “The texture needs to be creamy on the inside.”
The first few she made were too firm and too dense. She started playing around with the temperature and the cooking times. Khuu said that arriving at the desired level of creaminess mainly requires the right temperature and the right ratio of heavy cream to cream cheese, along with any supplemental ingredients.
As she’s transitioned from a pop-up business to a brick-and-mortar, Khuu has had to hire a staff. “I have been working alone the past two years,” she said. “It’s mainly just a challenge to be able to trust people, or just letting go because this is my baby.” As a boss, she aims to treat everyone as an equal. “That’s the feeling I got from my previous job. There’s no hierarchy. Everyone has the same vibe and gets along together.”
At the moment, Milk Cloud is open for retail sales two days a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays. “I don’t want to just open a third day randomly,” Khuu said. “We’re still figuring it out. I want to figure out what’s my schedule and then hire more people. At the same time my health is important, too. We just want to make sure everything is in the right place.”
Milk Cloud Bakery, 2701 Eighth St., Suite 116, Berkeley. Open Thu & Sat, 10am to 2:30pm. IG @milkcloudbakery.
