forty

Few things are as visually appealing as a sprinkle landscape.

I barely ate non dessert items today. This is what happens when you spend all day making desserts and can't be bothered to deal with proper meals.

One caprese bun for breakfast, toasted in pork fat, with a thin spread of gochujang aioli and a single cured mushroom slice.

Yesterday was the first time I've actually had the patience to process and roast my leftover squash seeds. As opposed to how I usually save them all with the intention of roasting them but then forget about them until I find them weeks later all covered in mold and then I have to throw them out with a huge frown on my face. And this repeats every time I do anything with squash.

I dried them out in the beating sun this time. So today I could roast with garam masala + salt and finish with shaved salted egg yolk.

I'm still on a mission to make brownies with maximum chocolate but minimum egg.

113 g chocolate, 3T butter, 1/2c sugar + a drizzle of molasses + 1 egg + 50g flour + 1/2t baking powder

With ~1T umeboshi caramel and a minimal black sesame swirl.

It was fudgey enough, but it wasn't cohesive enough.

Took a quick break to admire the afternoon light over these sakura meringues.

Okay, the only true meal of the day was spaghetti remnants, the last bit of tomato paste, garlic, cherry tomatoes, one mint leaf, a slice of lemon, a couple chunks of sardines and their olive oil, and a handful of panko.

Eaten while complaining to Krissy about my stupid meringue cake.

Sardine spaghetti was obviously not enough, so had the last caprese bun, plainly toasted. With mint and hibiscus la croix. This is the epitome of a bachelorette dinner if I've ever seen one:

Okay. The freaking meringue cake.

This is where I would've liked to have finished with it. Except that I grossly underestimated how long the cake would need to par-bake for because the cake underneath was still raw.

... so this is what the meringue cake ended up looking like.

Umeboshi caramel + raspberry vanilla cake topped with [burnt] sakura meringue.

The ratio just makes it look like a boy with a fresh new styled hair cut. Sigh.

Removed slice eaten with my hands like an apple anyways during the cutest little panda and bamboo game.