san francisco + berkeley

what i've consumed in the bay area so far:

many little gems, stunning avocados.

three yolo slices of cheeseboard pizza, heavy on the green sauce.

one rebel within. omg. just. omg. 

dumpling in zanthoxylum schinifolium etzucc sauce.

bougie kombucha, because i'm quickly falling for kombucha despite its explosive qualities.

half of a veggie top dog as an appetizer to my cheeseboard pizza.

the best most delicate tomato soup i ever had + the best plum galette i ever had, complete with a sturdy caramelized crust, at the motherland.

the only flavored coffee drink i've ever truly loved, the mint mojito coffee at philz (easy on the cream and sugar).

a loquat and a sour plum, picked by tall tall timo on a sunny stroll through berkeley.

an inspiring gougère the size of my head.

10 soup dumplings.

too much wine.

and a ramp bulb from just left of the astonishing eggplant section at the berkeley bowl.

again, my wedding diet starts tomorrow.

-yeh!

our town bakery

down a straight and dusty road, not more than 20 farmsteads south of ours, is a grain elevator and its town, hillsboro, north dakota. it occupies one square mile that's home to a large city hall with a stately bust of abraham lincoln out front, a very cute vintage shop where blue stickers denote the registered items for whatever town wedding is approaching, and a magical little bakery.

this bakery, our town bakery, is the definition of a gem.

one apple muffin and one bite out of the golden section of eggboy's cinnamon roll is worth every second of the 40 minutes it takes to drive there. and all i want in this moment is one of their sprinkley donuts.

sometimes when we're there we pretend that we're in the bushwick-circa-2009 of the world. if that even makes sense. it's just so much goodness in the middle of so much nowhere. and no you can't ride your bike from manhattan.

so if you're wondering a) what you should do if you ever find yourself in hillsboro without me or, b) what eggboy and i did this weekend when we should have been unpacking/painting/putting up wallpaper/ordering our floors, the answer is our town.

how were all of your weekends?? did you eat anything yummy?

-yeh!

CAKES AND CAKES AND CAKES

{1} marzipan over a chocolate cake for farmer gene and his wife, {2} a carrot cake that looks "too normal" according to mum, {3} my response to mum's concern, {4} a cookie cake for jaclyn, {5} red velvet with cream cheese and coconut, {6} rosette practice. oy.

---

you guys. 

this whole nocturnal thing is baaaaananas. a typical day for me begins at 1 am with things like cinnamon rolls the size of my head and sixty cavity's worth of caramel rolls. by 5 am i'll typically be frosting a cake or cupcakes, and then after that i come home and wake eggboy up with shakshuka or egg tacos or some other big breakfast because it's dinner for me and a typical meal for him.

you'd think the logical next step would be for me to go to sleep while eggboy farms... but 1) i have not yet found blackout curtains that are anywhere near acceptably pretty, 2) it appears that small towns come with a bell tower that likes to play patriotic tunes every hour on the hour, and 3) i just started watching orange is the new black.  

so your girl is running on approximately negative hours of sleep and i have zits about it.

but it is so worth it!  

because i am frosting so many cakes! and it is so fun and creatively challenging! and no offense to my sister's wedding cake but with the help from the other bakers and the pressure knowing that the cakes i make are going to people who aren't in my immediate family is making me feel way more legit. (except for when i over beat the cream cheese frosting and it gets droopy, which so far has been every time.)

almost every day this week i've come home from the bakery and made more cake, mostly for friends, so the above photos are a mix of ones i've made at the bakery and ones i've made at home.

not pictured: the salty pimp inspired cupcakes that i made today that are in fact "salty princesses" because i suppose one simply does not throw around the word "pimp" in grand forks, north dakota. at least not as it pertains to desserts.

ok. it's 11 am aka way past my bedtime and i think i will go write about new music. 

-yayyyyyyy

OH JUST A LITTLE PICNIC ON A DOCK

you wouldn't know it if you were to open our closets or smell our vintage couch or see our "artistically" arranged folding chairs, but egg and i have been workin hard! and not just because we haven't had internet long enough to get back into game of thrones.  unpacking with barely any shelves to arrange things in cute ways is mentally quite taxing, and baking and whisking nearly puts cymbal practice to shame. egg has been farming and farming, and when he's not farming, he's building us rustic-y furniture.

so we decided we'd take a little break. not the kind of break where i decide to hang out with my new friend the garbage disposal (omg this thing is so cool!), but the kind of break where we pack a picnic and drive to a peninsula in a lake in minnesota.

it was so very dandy. 

we ate israeli salad and hummus topped with roasted chickpeas, berries and beans from the farmers' market (which happens steps from our front door) , and fried brown rice with chickens. afterward we went in a canoe, and then for a run. we spotted a few cute pickups along the way. it was a very fantastic day.

in other news, it's about a quarter to two in the afternoon and i'm thinking i should soon go on my foam roller and then to bed. your girl is needed at the bakery at one in the a.m.!

-yeh!