Gloria C.Y. Kam isn't a kid. But she sure felt like she was in the proverbial candy store last week when she made her first visit to Sing Cheong Yuan Chinese Bakery, at 1129 Maunakea Street in Chinatown.

The Kaimuki grandmother, a third-generation Hawai'i Chinese, had stopped in at Asia Arts, two doors down on Maunakea Street, to pick up lunar new year greeting cards for family and friends, and the scarlet envelopes for li see (New Year's money gifts) for her grandchildren and the other young ones in the family.

Then she saw the new bakery: "It's got everything," she said, her eyes wide as a child's as she looked around at the window shelves packed with sugared fruits, nut candy, bride's cakes and the glass case filled with trays of moon cakes, jin doi (fried sesame balls), bao/manapua (stuffed buns), gau (rice pudding) and shelves stocked with bags of red- and gold-wrapped "lucky candy."

Not that other stores in Chinatown don't sell these items or that there are no other bakeries there, she said, but few have the full complement of New Year's confections and cakes Chinese families must have on hand as they visit and are visited during the holiday period, which begins Monday. Kam expects to see all six of her children, their too-numerous-to-count children and even a couple of children's children's children, not to mention cousins and friends.

Though some lunar new year specialties can be made at home, they take considerable work, time and skill, so most Chinese prefer to buy them ready-made, zipping out of the bakery with boxes tied with pink strapping, the white cardboard already splotched with oozing fat.

"For Chinese, this is necessary," said Wesley Fang, who operates the bakery with his wife, Mei. Not only are the sweets delicious, they are highly symbolic, Fang said. In general, they symbolize the desire for a sweet year. But most also imply a specific wish — for health or prosperity or many children, for example.

It delighted Kam, too, to hear that the items in the cases are all made in-house; last year, she could only find imported sugared fruit, and, although the stuff has a long shelf life, she prefers to know where her goodies come from.

The recipes for some of these items may seem simple: boil fruit in sugar, stuff pastry dough with black beans.

But they're not.

Take the great favorite, sesame peanut candy, a brown sugar taffy dotted with peanuts and coated with sesame seeds: Boil Chinese slab sugar (wong tong) in water with a little vinegar and some rice flour or cornstarch for thickening; pour shelled, roasted peanuts into the candy; turn it all out on a board sprinkled thickly with sesame seeds, spread more seeds on the top, cool and cut.

But there is much more to it than that. Temperature, timing, even the nature of the pot in which the candy is cooked all play key roles, said Wesley Fang. Boil the taffy at too high a temperature or for the wrong length of time; cut it while it's too warm, or let it cool too long and you could have candy so hard it's suitable only for use as a martial arts weapon or so soft it won't hold its shape for cutting.

The bakery has four candy-making stations, of which one is in use at all times; this week, there will be times when all four are fired up. The candy is made in copper pots big enough that you could bathe triplets in them; they cost about 4,500 yuan or about $600 to $700 each.

The bubbling taffy is stirred with a paddle the length of a broom handle, cooked for four hours, until it's reduced by about half. The bakers know by look, smell and feel when it's ready for the peanuts.

The mixture is then turned out onto a wooden table covered a quarter-inch thick with sesame seeds, then surrounded by a wooden form about 2 1/2 feet by 4 feet. The baker quickly smoothes the viscous candy all the way to the edges and corners to form a rectangle, carefully leveling it using a squared length of wood. Another thick scattering of sesame seeds completes the process and the candy sits until it's almost cool — again, a judgment based on experience, feel and eye. No candy thermometers here.

Four slabs of candy are piled, to save time in cutting, and a cleaver sharp enough to slice paper is used to cut diamonds, squares or rectangles. They make 45 pounds of candy per batch and at least two batches a day, five batches at this time of year, Fang said.

The making of tong go (sugared fruit) is equally tricky and laborious. The old Hawai'i Chinese cookbooks make it sound like a snap: just boil sliced fruit in syrup and dry it in the sun. Not so, said Wesley Fang. Each fruit requires a slightly different treatment: lotus must first be soaked and dried in a warm wok, for example. And the fruit isn't boiled in syrup just once, it's boiled and dried in a dry wok then boiled and dried again multiple times — three or four at least.

The master who keeps Sing Cheong Yuan on track is Fang's father, Guo Quan Fang, a baker in Chinatown for more than 25 years, who retired a while back.

But the Fangs, who moved here from Guandong province in 1980 and own New Mui Kwai restaurant in Kailua and Golden Duck in Makiki, kept getting requests for either his services or his recipes, so they decided to open a bakery. He seems perfectly happy to be back at work as he presides over a series of long, crowded rooms at the rear of the bakery, lined on one side with the ultra-high-BTU gas wok stations where candy is boiled, Chinese pretzels fried and bao buns steamed, and fancy new double-doored ovens where pastries are baked.

Fang said the bakery's goal is to push the envelope, creating new specialties. One that's getting a lot of attention is macadamia nut sesame candy. There's also a walnut version. Neither is traditional; peanut is the standard. (Having tasted all three — peanut, walnut and mac nut — I vote for the mac nut, hands down. Walnuts overpower the candy. Peanut is predictably good. But mac nut is positively decadent.)

One nice thing for those who don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin is that all the confections and cakes are labeled in both Chinese characters and English, and the stuffings in many of the pastries are identified, so you know if you're buying a black sugar moon cake or one filled with lotus root paste.

Throughout the year, the bakery will introduce new specialties, Wesley Fang said. But right now, they're pretty focused on tradition: "We cooking all day long."

OH, THE SELECTION ...

Some bakery specialties at Sing Cheong Yuan (pastries, candies and cookies range from 55 cents to $1 apiece; sugared fruit ranges from $5.50-$6.75 a pound; buns are $1 apiece and molded cakes $3.50-$5.50).

Sing Chong Yuen: 1027 Mana Kea; 7 a.m.-5 p.m. daily; 531-6688

• Tong go (sugared fruit), about 10 types, from coconut to sweet potato

• Gau (rice flour cake with red date and sesame)

• Moon cakes, rice flour dough stuffed with black sugar (black beans boiled in syrup), duck egg yolk, or lotus paste, pressed into a decorative mold, and baked or steamed

• Jin doi (deep-fried sesame balls, stuffed with coconut, char siu or black sugar)

• Jung, sweet rice mixed with various rich ingredients and steamed in a bamboo leaf wrapping

• Rice cake, a soft, puffy rice flour confection

• Twists, deep-fried won ton pi dipped in honey

• Bao, baked or steamed buns filled with curry chicken, char siu, black sugar or even hot dogs

• Mochi rolls, steamed rice batter sheets filled with various ingredients and formed into a roll; the dough for banana rolls is flavored with banana extract and the rolls filled with lotus seed and black sugar paste

• Sesame candy, taffy blended with various nuts and coated in toasted sesame seeds

• Almond cookies

• Tea cakes, cookies made with the juice in which sugared fruit is cooked

• Chinese pretzels, confections made with a thin, sweet batter fried on decorative metal molds in hot fat