chestnut mug cake.

Autumn, factually speaking, lasts three months. It didn't feel that way to me, however; the first few days of the season still bore the lingering heat of summer like a reluctant goodbye, then all of a sudden the leaves of trees all around burst into hues of fire and gold - a pretty picture too fleeting as strong unrelenting gusts of autumnal wind scattered them to the ground and stripped the branches bare. Alas, winter has arrived.

yogurt pancakes with sauteed cinnamon apples.

Sometimes I feel as though the universe is conspiring against me, such as today - on which I was planning to make pancakes and upload a post because winter break has finally, thankfully begun. Otherwise I wouldn't usually have enough time to bake and take decent pictures before the sun sets, which is crazy early here right now. But when I woke up this morning the sky was moodier than I typically am on Mondays and obstinately remained the same overcast shade of grey the entire day.

mini honey butter white chocolate crushed cookies donuts.

I have no idea how to start this post. Let's eat.

hello tokyo.

And hello blog.

recipe on repeat - cream cheese, walnut and chocolate chip cookies.

But always a little different.

4-ingredient cream cheese cookies.

Quick, easy, minimal, fun. Flour, cream cheese, butter, sugar. Full stop.

And exclamation mark!

melon bread ／メロンパン

Put your hands up for hands down the best bread I have ever made in my entire life.

maple blueberry jam tarts.

Basically a suggestion as to how to eat some dang awesome blueberry jam.

tarte grenobloise.

Think chocolate caramel pecan pie with an air of French sophistication - chocolate-almond pâte sablée, bittersweet chocolate cream ganache, a pecan caramel that balances on the delicate line between sauce-like and stodgy with tightrope walker perfection. Oui, s'il vous plaît. 

cherry almond mascarpone tart.

Hi! I'm back! From a month's absence from this blog that is. I was hoping that a long break from baking would inspire me to make something and I guess it did, eventually. Somehow. But really this is just one of the seemingly thousands of recipes I've bookmarked and sworn to make at some point this year. I was just so restless this week and desperately needed something to occupy my time with, and I'd exhausted most other ideas I had by week four of no baking. Like reading a book - read 11 this month actually - and shopping for clothes for university life - never knew I could get sick of shopping.

And then it struck me. I could bake! I'd not thought about baking for such a long time that I forgot that I actually can bake. I actually find that pretty amazing. The moment that notion popped into my mind I was itching to get started, but on what exactly I was absolutely clueless about. I didn't have a specific ingredient that I wanted to work with - all I knew is that I wanted to do something - so I figured a fruit tart would be the perfect thing to make because I'll just let what fruit that's in season do the deciding for me, which happened to be cherries.

michael rostang's double chocolate mousse cake.

Does this cake look like a giant round of chocolate truffle or what? Sorry just had to get that out of my mind and out of the way.

(how-to) ridiculously tall pancakes.

Are you one of those people who look at pancakes that are about three quarters of an inch tall and immediately your eyes narrow as if to sneer disapprovingly - "Fluffy? Those frisbee things?"? Chances are you think that if you have to stoop to view your stack of pancakes at eye level to capture how "tall" they are, they are nowhere near your desired level of thickness. No. Thick and fluffy pancakes are pancakes that no matter what angle from which they are looked at, are undeniably - for the lack of synonyms - tall. That would mean that the pancakes would have to be at least an inch high, and preferably a lot more.

But how?

99% of the recipes out there with superlatives like "fluffiest", "thickest", "bestest buttermilk" (because in the pancake world buttermilk is a sure ticket to fluffy pancakes) often produce pancakes that often fall short - literally - of your expectations. After trying out quite a few myself, I came to the conclusion that even a pancake batter of the greatest potential to rise is unable to achieve great pancake heights by itself. Essentially I mean to say that the key to two-inch-tall pancakes (which incidentally is roughly the height of these pancakes) lies in not just the rising power of the pancake batter but also in the method used to make the pancakes.

Are you curious as to what the method is? Then read on, fellow pancake maniacs!

nutella french toast pudding.

The history of hybrid desserts often goes something like this: If chocolate chip cookies and brownies/pancakes and french toast/doughnuts and croissants are already so good on their own, won't combining them result in double the deliciousness?

brownies with biscoff-chocolate marble frosting.

I've never really thought to eat biscoff with anything other than white bread. Because seriously, does biscoff even need any embellishment? But I was curious as to what else would go well with the cookie butter so I decided to experiment with chocolate for starters. And I think we can all agree that there is no baked good that could be a better embodiment of chocolate than the darkest fudgiest brownie.

chocolate (bar) cookies.

Your perception of chocolate cookies will probably never be the same again.

origami paper balloon cheesecakes.

I was browsing through YouTube recently and I found the most amazing Japanese baking/cooking channel and the cutest idea I've seen in a while - these!

chocolate rose cookies.

If you've absolutely nothing to do (like I was) and have reached your limit of scrolling through random webpages (like I had) and have refreshed your Instagram feed for the third time that minute (like I did), then you might wanna try making these cookies because not only are they fun - albeit slightly challenging at first - they take up around 2 hours of your time and leave you so strangely exhausted after you're done that you would feel like taking a 2 hour nap. So that's 4 hours spent productively. Yay.

matcha white chocolate cake + one million blog views!

Oh em gee. Do my eyes deceive me? This blog has reached one million views! 1,000,000! I have finally conquered the milestone that every blogger dreams of (I think)! I still remember the time the counter registered 100 and I literally couldn't fall asleep after that, and now here I am another four zeros later. I'll probably be opening the dashboard window every waking hour to just marvel at the sight of seven digits in the counter over the next few days. Hah.

cheesecake-filled chocolate easter eggs.

Happy (early) Easter y'all! Frankly speaking Good Friday and Easter Sunday don't hold any special significance for me but Easter-themed bakes are too fun to pass up! The last time I made some dyed eggs with vanilla pound cake baked in them and they were just so precious I wanted to make them again this year. Unfortunately I've been a bit busy lately so I had to give up on that notion but good news - I might have found something even more exciting!

kinako dark chocolate sugar cookies.

Saw this cookie idea on Instagram some time back and thought it was too cute not to replicate.

strawberries and condensed milk whipped cream pancake tacos.

Today's post is more of a recipe idea. The title is already pretty self-explanatory but I'll give you a brief run down on these pancake tacos anyway. (Somehow the word "tacos" doesn't really go with "pancakes" but "sandwiches" isn't particularly accurate either so oh well.)

chocolate chip cookie dough scones.

What would you do with extra cookie dough? Eat it raw? Sandwich it between two layers of cake? Plop small mounds of it in a pool of cheesecake batter? I can say with certainty that all of the above options are delicious ones - see chocolate chip cookie dough cake and chocolate chip cookie dough cheesecake bars; if you've not eaten raw cookie dough you're missing out! - but if you know me, I don't like predictable and I usually prefer to try a new recipe than repeat something I've already made.

sugar-crusted french toast.

Okay I'm gonna cut to the chase. This french toast is mind-blowing.

double chocolate rum raisin loaf.

So as you guys know, I have a penchant for using leftover ingredients to create new ideas (in fact my creativity is maximised that way); this time I worked with some rum soaked raisins I had in surplus from the tart I made last week. I wouldn't call a chocolate cake with chocolate chips and rum raisins folded into the batter particularly innovative but I figured that it's been a while since I made chocolate cake.

triple chocolate rum raisin tart.

So I wanted to make a cake for my BFF's birthday and when I called her up to ask her what she wanted in her cake, she replied with "something coffee" and "oh I rather have a tart".

dark chocolate blueberry cream cheese coffee cake.

This cake. Goes into my mental list of Things That Make Me Glad That I'm Alive. Either I've not been eating enough cake recently or this cake is just plain delicious but whichever the case, I've not been able to stop thinking about it. You know how when you bake a certain dessert and it's so good you immediately think about when you're going to make it again, how you're going to switch it up for fun and basically conjure up a whole list of variations while you're quietly nibbling on whatever it is you baked? I've been doing that. Even now as I'm enthusiastically punching the keys of the keyboard. I'm practically gushing now I'd better stop and get on with explaining what's so good about this cake.

marie helene's apple cake.

I've been loving baking with fruits very frequently as of late but I've not made apple anything yet, which is strange because there are just so many delish apple desserts out there. Apple pie, apple strudel, caramel apples (ohhhhhmygosh)... you get the idea. So when I found this recipe in Dorie Greenspan's Around my French Table I knew that I had to get some apples and get cracking.

earl grey ferrero rocher cake.

Confession: My fridge is overflowing with chocolate. And more than 50% of the chocolates are ferrero rochers. They arrived in one of those square plastic boxes that contain around 50? 100? 39473? of them and as much as the family loves ferrero rochers, there are just way too many of them.

orange-almond tart.

I found it! Dorie Greenspan's Around my French Table! I wasn't expecting to chance upon it at the library so it was a pleasant surprise. The savory recipes look so tantalizing but alas, the only ones I really feel like trying are the desserts. And there are so many delicious-sounding ones I just didn't know where to start! Marie-Helene's apple cake, sugar-crusted french toast, coupetade (french toast pudding!!), double chocolate banana tart... This book is nuts!

chaos and carbs.

Hola! I don't have a new recipe today but I just wanted to update the blog. Well actually I just brought the blog back from a state of chaos and destruction and I feel so relieved that I just felt like posting something. I don't think I managed to make my point but in essence, I'm o v e r j o y e d ! Argh never will I attempt to play around with the blog template again, no matter how bored I am. If you saw the mess the blog was in when I was formatting it I'm so sorry it will never happen again!! *traumatized for life* Essentially there were duplicates of the blog header and posts and there was no "remove" option in the layout (faints). There were a few widgets that were all over the place as well. I'm not sure how it happened but I think loading in a new template must have modified the basic layout somehow. Anyway, I managed to get everything back to normal (after 2 hours) and I'm so happy to have my plain old blog back again *tears of joy* Looks like I'm doomed to be a techno-idiot for life.

So on to some interesting content that doesn't make me sound like an incapable fool.

Here is a tart that I've not blogged about, an orange custard almond tart. The tart shell and custard recipe is the same as the blueberry custard tart's.

kinako banana chiffon cake sandwiches ／きな粉バナナシフォンサンド

Taking a short break from tarts! To be honest I could eat them every week for the rest of my life but I'm getting tired of making them. Good thing that I only bought two new tart pans. So until my interest in baking tarts is revived - I did promise myself that I would bake the whole book - I'll probably be churning out a few types of chiffon cake sandwiches (which I would likely tire of in three weeks hah). I've been wanting to make more of them ever since I made these matcha adzuki chiffon cake sandwiches because they allow so much room for creativity, not to mention are fun to assemble!

almond tart with sauteed bananas with rum and cinnamon ／バナナのラムシナモングラッセのタルト

Good day folks! I now present to you... tart number three!

berries tart ／ベリーのタルト

Anddd I'm on to my second tart this week! It's crazy how much I adore this book. The tart I chose to make this time is this berries tart because well, I had some strawberries and cream cheese on hand but truth be told I was dying to make a certain banana caramel one!

blueberry custard tart ／ブルーベリーのカスタードタルト

I know I'm approximately 11 days late but happy new year everyone! The moment the last minute of 2014 lapsed into the first minute of 2015 I was in Japan (a.k.a. my favorite place on earth) so my 2015 got off to a wonderful start. This also explains the silence for the past few weeks or so but I brought back tons of inspiration from Japan so I'll be updating more frequently from now on, or at least until my inspiration runs out!