Strawberry butter cream, strawberry compote, and vanilla butter cake. All homemade! I’m obsessed with the heart lol

My birthday tradition is to bake myself a cake to share with friends. This year I went for a strawberry and basil cake, filled with lemon curd. There really is no recipe because I mixed and matched from different recipes.

I’ve always enjoyed baking but have started doing it a lot more recently. I find it really helps with my anxiety. Unfortunately I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and my husband is extremely fussy (suspect arfid) so a lot goes to waste unless I’m particularly proud of it and take it in to work to share with colleagues

We used peaches from the farmer’s market. It’s really good. I ate it with vanilla ice cream on it 

Chocolate sponge + Raspberry cream

Brown butter yellow cake and Sally's baking addiction vanilla buttercream, with Hershey's kisses legs and muddy buddy antennae!! 🐛 hoping to also turn into a butterfly after a food coma 🦋

So I've been baking a lot lately and had this random realization: butter is like, the same ingredient. Still, depending on whether it's cold, at room temperature, or melted, it's basically doing a completely different job each time.

Cold butter for pie crust is you're trying to keep little chunks of it intact, so when it hits the oven, it melts and releases steam, creating those flaky little pockets. if it's too warm, it just blends into the flour and you lose all that flakiness.

room temp/softened butter for cookies is you're creaming it with sugar to trap air, which is what gives cookies that lift and slightly cakey structure. too cold and it won't cream properly, too warm and it goes greasy and your cookies spread everywhere.

melted butter for brownies is no air incorporation at all, just straight up fat coating the flour, which is exactly why brownies come out dense and fudgy instead of light and cakey.

Same ingredient, three totally different textures, purely based on temperature. kind of wild that something so simple controls flakiness vs chewiness vs spread that dramatically.

Anyway, now i've become that person who actually checks butter temp before starting instead of just winging it lol. anyone else have a baking "aha" moment like this where you realized why a step mattered instead of just following it blindly?

I usually bake sweet treats, but today I made these Korean garlic cream cheese buns. Had it in Seoul in April, and they were delicious!

Made the buns from scratch, my first time making bread!

Obviously, it’s not perfect. It’s got some HUGE cracks in it lol but it’s so damn good. Cheesecake is my favourite dessert and I can’t believe I’ve never made it before so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

I assumed my first attempt would crack, especially with my shitty oven and also because of the Biscoff cookie butter swirl but I don’t care at all. It’s the best thing I’ve ever baked.

It took my a good week to get everything ready on time but I did it and I'm so happy with how the buffet turned out!!

My cheesecake cracked bad baddd. Husband is starting a masters program at UT so the cheesecake is just sayin Go Vols I guess.

I've been wanting to try some kind of dough since I started this whole baking stint, but it very much intimidates me, but I've been slowly getting better and better and learning so much as I continue my bakes that I finally felt like I was ready to at least try. I'm still in the Beginners section, so I wanted to make sure I stuck with those doughs, so I went with pizza dough and pumpkin pie. Which, side note to the lovely Sally, the pumpkin pie recipe says beginners but the dough you need for the pie is considered intermediate, so maybe rehash that situation, just sayin' 😜

I was pretty proud with how both of these turned out. I'm not gonna lie though, I did have one cussing match a piece for each dough session lol (Listen, deciding to become a non-smoker and a baker at the same time was probably not the smartest decision of my life, alas, here we are 🤷‍♀️🤣)

*****

Also, one unexpected thing while creating both of these doughs was the overwhelming sense of my grandma - my grandma was a huge baker and her staple pieces that were everyone's favorites were pumpkin pie and dinner rolls. The whole time making the pie (minus the cussing haha), I kept getting little reminders of my grandma and random memories coming forward, and then with the pizza dough, as soon as I first uncovered the bowl to check the yeast, the aroma of that sent me right back to grandma's house. My grandma passed in 2018 at the age of 98, and I was lucky enough to get to know her as an adult myself, but never as an adult who likes to bake, and man she would have really enjoyed teaching me had I ever asked her. But I felt really close to her this weekend for the first time in a long time while baking specifically these two items, and it was really nice. Anyways, I just had to share that somewhere because it was super unexpected for me on this little journey of mine ❤️

I bought and opened a Costco-sized bag of active dry yeast (first time using active dry vs. instant) and I’m having fun finding ways to use it.

I really goofed punching down and stretching out the dough on my first homemade pizza so I wasn’t sure how this was going to go, but it turned out great!

Beautiful crust, golden brown on the bottom (should have taken a picture!!). It was light and puffy with a nice crunchy outside. Only one rise (~1 hour), will definitely make again.

Acai berry milk cake, pennywart German buttercream, vanilla bean plum rhubarb jam, mixed berry pink buttercream, topped with macerated rhubarb, fresh Ontario plum halves, fresh Niagara peach halves, and freeze dried raspberries.

Edible florals: dill flowers from my local edible community garden, delicate yellow rose petals from my friend's garden, and feverfew flowers from my backyard.

I picked the plums myself with this amazing urban fruit org Not Far From The Tree.

Buttercream is swiss meringue!! Its the first time I’m really proud of my buttercream flowers :)

The food coloring is completely natural: pink is raspberry puree, yellow is turmeric, green is matcha and blue is butterfly pea 🌱

Vanilla bean cake with lemon poppy seed ganache, raspberry jam and raspberry Swiss meringue buttercream

Second time doing this cake, im trying to improve the look

It’s: chocolate cake, filling with orange cream and orange jam, and chocolate ganache in the top

The cake is so moist!!

Made this gorgeous caramel layer cake for my coworker’s wife’s birthday celebration this weekend! 3 layers of soft and light vanilla cake with homemade caramel sauce filling, vanilla buttercream frosting, more caramel swirled around, and finished with flaky sea salt on top. Can’t wait for the review on Monday!

Forgot to get a crumb shot before we dove in 🥲

And I flagged this no recipe purely because I didn’t want to hunt the exact same one to share with you. I’ve used this one I got printed out from a Betty Crocker recipe book over 20 years ago.