A few months of baking, a bake sale, and a hairdryer at the office

Somewhere between February and now I’ve been baking a lot but not writing about any of it, so I have some catching up to do 😅

There’s a particular kind of baking slump where you don’t stop baking, you just stop finishing things, half-tested recipes that never get written up, cakes eaten before they’re photographed, a general feeling of going through the motions. And then my workplace did a bake sale for mental health, and something clicked. I made way too much. That’s the honest summary. But I also really needed it 🥹

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The bake sale

I brought coffee salt bread with a biscuit topping, a taro snow cake, and a taro mochi Chinese flaky spiral pastry. The salt bread is a riff on one I’ve made enough times to do mostly on feel, the coffee adds this subtle bitterness that’s really nice against the salty buttery pull-apart, and the biscuit topping gives it just enough crunch 🤤. The snow cake was soft sponge with taro filling, whipped cream and mochi, then dusted in milk powder so it looks like it’s been lightly snowed on, one of those finishes that looks very fancy but is genuinely so easy. And the spiral pastry was the most technically demanding of the three, the laminated dough is fiddly and you really hope the layers show up when you cut it, but they did! 🥳

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The hojicha purin cake, and the hairdryer incident

Around the same time I made a hojicha sponge with Japanese-style custard pudding, which is one of those techniques that feels a bit terrifying. You pour the caramel and custard into the tin first, then the cake batter on top, bake the whole thing in a water bath, and just trust that the denser custard stays put so that when you flip it out it sits on top like a crown. I was fully convinced it was going to sink into the batter and become one scrambled mess 😅

It didn’t. It came out perfectly.

What I didn’t account for was the unmoulding. Getting the caramel to release cleanly needs warmth, and I hadn’t quite planned for that at the office… so I brought a hairdryer. It worked 💀

Tip: Wrap your tin in two layers of foil before the water bath so water doesn’t seep in, and use water that’s already hot when you pour it into the tray.

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Lychee rose chiffon for a friend’s 25th 🌸

I’d been practising decorating, piping and getting a smooth cream finish, and I really wanted to make something pretty for an actual occasion, so a friend’s 25th felt like the perfect excuse. I went with lychee and rose, mostly because the combination sounded dreamy and I wanted to see how it came out.

The lychee was beautiful. The rose water in the whipped cream though… lesson learned 😬. Rose water adds enough liquid to make the cream go really soft and hard to whip properly, and infusing with petals takes way longer than it’s worth. Next time I’d use rose essence, which is alcohol-based so it doesn’t mess with the cream, and you only need a few drops.

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Dad’s birthday: oolong mandarin chiffon 🍊

This one took about three hours of testing and quite a bit of nervous energy. Chiffon is unforgiving, it lives or dies by the meringue, and I’d never made this flavour combo before. The mandarin came from a tin, which is genuinely the right call, canned mandarins are already peeled of all the bitter white pith, evenly sweet, and soft enough to fold into the batter without weighing it down. I had some leftover oolong powder lying around and used that for the flavour, which made it really concentrated and easy to work with, and goes so nicely with citrus.

It came out exactly how I wanted it to 🥹 Dad was like woahhh looks good, though he did mention he’d like a classic vanilla next time 😂

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On decorating

Something I’ve been deliberately working on alongside all of this is how things look, specifically piping and getting a smooth, even cream finish on the outside of a cake. It takes a bench scraper, a cake spatula, patience, and a lot of practice, and it’s one of those skills that looks simple until you’re actually trying to do it. Getting the flavour right is one kind of satisfaction. Getting it to also look the way you imagined is another entirely, and I’m slowly getting there 🥰

Sometimes you just need a reason to make too much, stay up late, and bring a hairdryer to work.