Pastry Thangs
Finding Royalty in the Oven
I’ve made galette des rois every year since moving to London. Last year, I filled it with a dense Nutella frangipane. The year before, my first year in London, I made a traditional one, of which there is no photographic evidence apart from some scribbles in my notebook. I
Navigating relevancy and creativity (ft. a cake)
By several measures, I am not a relevant person. I don't watch reality cooking shows (no, not even Great British Bake Off). I did not make sourdough starter during the pandemic. I do not like macarons. I did not eat soufflé pancakes in Japan (they aren't
Eat a Pastry, Eat the World: My Interview on the Experience Explorer
A conversation with experiences expert Christina Herbach about the intersectionality of desserts, design, and exploring the world more deeply.
A Personal Celebration of World Nutella Day
Today is World Nutella Day! It's a silly day, in the way that Ice Cream Day is a day and Chocolate Chip Cookie Day is a day. There are more foods than there are days in a year, so a food rarely gets to claim a day as
Recipe: Nutella-Swirled Banana Bread
One of my golden rules of being a pastry cook is to never, ever be too good to make banana bread. No matter what level of baking you're at, you can always learn something from banana bread. It's a pastry that's stupefyingly easy, frustratingly
Recipe: Nutella-rum galette des rois (or de reines)
I'd never made a galette de rois before because well, I'm not French nor religious. In California, these galettes were uncommon, and as of the last two years, 6th Jan has bleakly become the anniversary of the attempted coup of the American government. In Europe however,
A recipe for puff pastry, and your life
Good pastry derives from a good recipe. Great pastry relies on a good recipe plus a cook's intuition on how to use that recipe. How do you know when the dough is mixed enough, wet enough, dry enough, supple enough? How do you really know when it's really ready?
Pumpkin Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
As a Californian, fall in London is strange. I come from a land without seasons and therefore without a sense of time. For my whole life, I relied on something else to signal that fall had begun, which doesn't exist in London—rows and rows of canned pumpkin.
Diwali, chai ganache, and questioning tradition
Every since I started hosting Diwali dinner parties, I wonder what all millennial children-of-immigrants wonder: Am I doing it right?
She's a ten but she turns on the oven when it's 38 degrees outside.
Turning on the oven in a heat wave sounds straight up insane. But every restaurant right now is doing it; during we did it too. The thermostat would creep up and we'd watch, but only for a second because we had crostatas to bake. It was hot but the show must go on.
A spelt strawberry torte and the start of summer
I know it's summer when the strawberries start tasting sweet.
Life lessons from quince...and Kanye
When we moved to London, one of the first things I noticed (besides the fact that mask-wearing outside wasn't a thing, unlike my paranoid home of San Francisco) was fruit—everywhere. Crates and shelves and baskets gleaming with the most colourful fruits I'd ever seen in