I grew up cooking and baking with my family, and those are some of the best memories I have. Everything from making grandpa’s enchiladas, papa's BBQ sauce, granny’s yams, my dad’s iced tea, and my mom’s pineapple upside-down cake fill my mind with fond memories. Although cooking is my first love, I have a sweet tooth, so I was drawn to baking. My cooking and baking really took off once I moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles for graduate school. Being in a new place, I spent a lot of time researching about food and how to make food; classic applications and figuring out simple ways to make food, and creating recipes that weren’t filled with “hacks” or unnatural things. The natural flavors of high-quality food are everything, and I try to embody that in baking with the use of natural, high-quality ingredients to flavor my dishes.
Even though I loved trying new recipes and dishes, I always relied on the recipes from my family when I wanted something that felt like home or needed to impress 😉. The one recipe I could always count on was my mom’s pineapple upside-down cake. She makes the most amazingly delicious cake. That’s the cake that really started it all. And, of course, the best pineapple upside-down cakes are made with yellow cake. If you know anything about old-school cakes, you might also have a memory of yellow cake, like yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
