Strawberry and Blueberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcake

Laura: I visited my friend Justine in Berkeley last weekend!  She had been eyeing cheesecake cupcakes as a baking project for a while, so we made them.  And then decided to jointly post about them!

Green Tea Layer Cake with Lemon Honey Ombre Buttercream

Green Tea Layer Cake with Lemon Honey Ombre Buttercream

I have to admit, last time I had green tea cake, I was not a fan.  My husband (then boyfriend) and I were visiting a friend who was studying abroad in Japan over our spring break (this was back in college).  We were staying in this strange hotel over a mall/supermarket, and for reasons I don't remember, we decided to eat every Japanese baked good and sweet from that supermarket.

For dinner.

Baking Experiment! Rolled Sugar Cookies with Varying Flours

Rolled sugar cookies with different flours: cake (pink), all-purpose (blue), and whole wheat pastry (green).

I'm a bit of a nerd, and part of what fascinates me about baking is the chemistry.  Bread goes into the oven elastic-y, sticky, and unpleasantly chewy, and comes out soft, pocketed with air holes, and delicious.  Despite a year of chemistry in high school, and another year in college, I can't explain why this happens.

Coconut Cream Mini Pies & How To Make Pie Crust Flowers

Coconut Cream Mini Pies

I have a deep, dark secret: I don't like coconut.  So, why am I making coconut cream pies?  My husband loves them, and I had never made them before, which means a new challenge for me!  I decided to miniaturize these because my husband would be the only one eating them, and he can only eat so much coconut cream pie.

Black & White Sesame Cupcakes with Sweet Bean Filling

Last week, I saw a blog post about a cupcake with black sesame buttercream.  Immediately, I began to plot my next cupcake.  I love sesame.  I sometimes have weird cravings for it.  I started to envision a lightly sesame cupcake with sweet bean filling and sesame buttercream.  At this point, I realized I was scheming to create a cupcake version of my favorite dim sum treat: Jin Deui.

Grapefruit Daisy Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream

I miss the sun.  Wintertime in Seattle is gray, rainy, dreary, gray, wet, and gray.  Honestly, Seattleites really should come up with a bunch of words for different types of gray...like the Eskimos have with snow (which is not true according to Wikipedia).  When I saw a recipe on Whisk-Kid for Grapefruit Poppy Seed Cupcakes with Strawberry Rhubarb Jam and Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream, I began craving them immediately because they seemed summery and delicious.

Valentine's Day Raspberry Mini Pies

I attempted to keep these mini pies a secret from my husband until Valentine's Day.  The plan was to make them the weekend before, freeze them, and then sneak home from work during lunch to bake one on Valentine's Day.  This mostly worked.  Unfortunately, my husband kept wanting to do annoying things like get into the freezer for ice.  So, he had to have known something was going on when I banned him from getting into the freezer.  A better idea might have been to store them in the freezer at work...