I’d been wanting to make a roll cake for a while, especially one as good as the kind Oshima Ruro from that one game whips up — the kind that’s delicious from the first bite. I finally gave it a shot recently, and man, it’s actually really hard. First off, a roll cake means baking a cake first. It’s a chiffon cake, just baked in a flat sheet pan. You can add matcha or whatever you like; the same cake can also serve as the base for a mousse cake, though if you’re using it as a base you can bake it a bit longer. There are plenty of chiffon cake methods out there, so I won’t go into it again. When baking in a flat pan, do not let it go past 20 minutes — that’s the max — and make sure the cake stays soft. Once it’s out, cool it down right away and start practicing a roll with parchment paper. If you don’t roll it now, it’ll firm up and crack when you try later. Then it’s time to whip the cream, spread it on, and roll.

“Gǔzǎo wèi” (old-school flavor) is a phrase you see more in Hong Kong and Taiwan — roughly means “ancestral recipe.” In northern mainland China, “old-school flavor cake” would probably just be called “traditional sponge cake,” though honestly it’s almost indistinguishable from chiffon cake at this point.

I’ve made mousse cake plenty of times, but this time I went for blueberry. The method was the same as before, just with crushed blueberry filling mixed in and blueberries on the outside for decoration…

Met up with Canadian dalao Siyan Zhang yesterday. Since we’re from the same hometown, I treated him to a meal.

Snowflake nougat is a dessert—a trendy internet snack, apparently. Lots of people have been into it lately. So I looked it up and the process isn’t that much trouble, and decided to make some myself. But I couldn’t be bothered to hunt down the ingredients. What to do? Just use bootleg substitutes. Snowflake nougat needs marshmallows, digestive biscuits, milk powder, butter, and cranberries. Roughly: butter into the pan first, then add marshmallows and stir, then dump in everything else and stir, take it out and press it flat, freeze it, then cut into pieces. Pretty simple, right? But I told you I didn’t have the ingredients. So what did I do?

Hey kids, I’m back making cookies again. This time it’s bacon and scallion cookies:

I’ve been making cookies for a while, matcha ones too, but this time I tried something different — with a swirl pattern.

First time making this thing, and it turned out a bit better than I expected.

For Mid-Autumn Festival I made a few cookie gift boxes and gave them to friends, including the ones I met up with in Beijing.