Growing up, cooking was the last thing on housewife Angeline Lim's mind. The bubbly 51-year-old remembers that she grudgingly helped to make pineapple tarts, kueh lapis, kueh bahulu and fruit and butter cakes during Chinese New Year and Christmas.

Her Peranakan family sold these goodies to relatives and neighbours, and the kitchen was turned into a "production line".

She says with a laugh: "Back then, I though it was obiang (uncool) to be cooking. Perhaps it was because I attended a convent school for 10 years and we learnt that women should be independent and not always be in the kitchen."

She also stayed away from the kitchen as her grandmother was very particular about cooking, down to which direction the knife should point when chopping vegetables.

It was only two years ago that she picked up baking, after retiring from her trading assistant job in the foreign exchange industry, one she held for 25 years.

Disappointed with cloyingly sweet and overpriced cakes in bakeries, she started baking classic butter and marble cakes from recipes that her elder sister, 64, got from their late mother.

She also enjoys baking airy light and fluffy chiffon cakes, in flavours such as matcha, Milo, black sesame, orange and dark chocolate.

Her most recent chiffon creation is flavoured with rose syrup. The idea came from the bandung drink of rose syrup and milk, and bandung panna cotta and jelly she makes for her family.

Inspired by the nostalgic drink, she jazzes up the rose chiffon cake with whipping cream flavoured with condensed milk.

She has a unique way of serving the cake too.

Instead of frosting it, she sandwiches slices of cake with dollops of cream. She says that this serving style is inspired by childhood memories of eating ice-cream sandwiches from street vendors near her home in Geylang.

"I was pampered as the youngest child in my huge extended family, and whenever the ice-cream truck came by in the afternoon, someone would buy that treat which cost just 10 cents," she says wistfully.

On a more practical note, this "DIY serving method" caters to her family of fussy eaters - her daughter, 15, does not eat fruit; her son, 18, dislikes chocolate and her businessman husband, 54, is watching his waistline and does not fancy buttery cakes.

She says: "I can tailor the cake to their liking and they help themselves to condiments such as the cream, lychees and lime basil leaves."

She included lychees as the fruit is often paired with rose-flavoured macarons and cakes in patisseries here.

Ms Lim usually bakes two times a week, turning out cakes and topping up the cookie jars with matcha, almond and sesame cookies.

Besides baking, she is also catching up on lost years of not picking up Peranakan cooking from her mother. These days, she trawls the Internet for laksa, ayam pongteh (chicken stew) and assam pedas (sour and spicy fish) recipes, and makes kueh such as kueh wajid and kueh pisang. She tweaks the recipes based on memories of how her mother's dishes tasted and gets cooking tips from her Peranakan friends.

She says: "I regretted not learning how to cook these dishes from my mother, but it is never too late. Cooking is a good way of getting in touch with your roots."