Today is the Day of Remembrance, a day of observance of February 19th, 1942 when the crime against humanity that was the mass internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, two thirds of whom were native-born American Citizens, first started. Innocent families, children, grandparents, were forcefully relocated into concentration camps primarily on the west coast of the United States. This was all done out of blatant ignorance and cowardice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the signing of Executive Order 9066, meant to solve the “Japanese Problem.” The irony of creating our very own concentration camps on US soil while fighting a war to…
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Gluten Free Tiramisu Layer Cake
This may be the weightiest cake I’ve ever made. It all started with a birthday cake request – always the best ones because it usually means something unique – since we all want something special for our special days – not a plain white or chocolate cake, no simple layers of simple buttercream, no repeat flavors or styles. That’s why I LOVE birthday cakes. This one was no exception. The one flavor note I got for the order was tiramisu, but of course we wanted to go in the classic layer cake direction so those perfect Italian flavors were spun into a four-layer, 9-inch cake with the most frostings, fillings,…
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Gluten Free Ube Angel Food Cake
Ube got me through one of the weirdest days of 2020. Now, I know what you’re thinking: what day WASN’T a weird day in 2020. Touché. But the 9th of September 2020 was a particularly bad day. The 8th of September, a fire started at the north end of Ashland, Oregon, where Kendra (the other half of SSG), my parents, my grandmother, dear friends, and a few aunts and uncles and cousins all live, and tore through most of the Rogue Valley like, you guessed it, wildfire, demolishing thousands of homes in its path. From 10am to 10pm that day, I was getting Twitter updates to track the fire’s spread,…
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Gluten Free Pineapple Cake
This is a brand new cake for me – thanks to special requests from colleagues for socially-distant birthdays for family members! I’ve always been a fan of pineapple upside down cake – the caramelized slices of fruit saturating the rest of the cake with deep summer sweetness. So this cake peaked my interest, and after a lot of recipe research, I landed on this creation: a sponge similar to an angel food or chiffon cake, with LOTS of eggs (not just egg whites!), not too much sugar, and cooled upside down to preserve the lightness of the risen layers. The secret addition (not so secret anymore)? Powdered freeze dried pineapple…
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Gluten Free Caramel Apple Inauguration Day Cake
This gluten free caramel apple cake was made with inspiration from the stereotype of the USA, which is the apple pie. For the momentous occasion of the Inauguration Day today – which was a great sigh of relief for us – I decided to make a small cake as something sweet to eat. As the cake is smaller than the standard, being only 6 inches across, it’s perfect for a dessert for only a few people which works well in this pandemic world. Today of all days, We are proud to call ourselves Americans and to say that we voted and look eagerly forward to the coming changes. The cake…
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Gluten Free Vietnamese Pandan Honeycomb Cake – Bánh Bò Nướng
This cake is one of my new favorites, and has me asking “why have we never been to Vietnam?!” because there are so many naturally gluten free desserts that are absolute dream boats of buttery, gorgeous, flavors and textures. Let’s back up. My dear friend and former roomie, Leslie Nguyen-Okwu (who happens to be an incredible journalist, speech writer, and all around amazing human – check her out here) sent me a recipe for Vietnamese Pandan Honeycomb Cake ages ago because it’s one of her favorites (her mother is Vietnamese and her grandmother still makes this occasionally) and because, lo and behold, it only requires tapioca starch which, as you…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Layer Cake with Cream Cheese Buttercream
There’s something about cream cheese frosting. For all of you lactose/dairy-free folk out there, I feel your pain – as a weird and twisted side effect of Celiac disease, I also lost the ability to digest lactose for years before and after diagnosis, so I’m quiiiiite familiar with the array of nut, rice, and soy mylks and cheeses out there, and Kendra, the younger taller sister of Sisters Sans Gluten, is still dairy free to this day! (she makes a mean dairy free cheesecake too). This cake, however, is definitely heavy on the dairy. Gotta love swoops of silky, slightly-tangy cream cheese buttercream wrapped around summery strawberry cake layers, billowy…
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Gluten Free Vanilla Bean & Chocolate Layer Cake
Sometimes you save a very-ambitious baking project for the day-of and sometimes it takes a biiiiiit longer to pull it all together than anticipated and sometimes that means you end up taking photos of it after the sun has DEFINITELY set (thanks Winter) so they turn out a bit grainier and darker than you planned. And that sometime was THIS time, but I’m still excited because it was the first time working with edible gold powder and doing this gold drip layer cake! Don’t let the outside deceive you, this cake is dark as night inside with velvety chocolate cake layered with bourbon cherry preserves (just add bourbon to anything…
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Kendra’s Gluten Free Velvet Spice Cake
This was the cakes to end all cakes. Every year, my sister and I would enter things into the Jackson county fair. Yes, it does sound like we just stepped out of a mid-20th-century Rogers and Hammerstein musical, but honestly these were some of the most exciting parts of summers in Southern Oregon! There were loads of categories too, which meant you could enter photographs, canned goods, home-sewn dresses, paintings, drawings, and baked goods all at once and vie for county-fair fame by coming out with one of those multi-colored, frilled, glorious objects: the GRAND PRIZE ribbon. The first price ribbon wasn’t too bad either but the grand prize, or…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Lemonade Layer Cake
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is! Earlier this year, in June, we were commissioned to make a big birthday cake for a friend and we came up with the ultimate summer combo: strawberry and lemon cake layers, wrapped in more silky strawberry and lemon buttercream – the strawberry lemonade cake! We were subsequently commissioned by another friend who had tasted the cake at the June birthday, to make it again for their other friend’s birthday. And now, months later and solidly out of summer, one of my longest friends decided the cake she wanted for her November birthday was, you guessed it, the epitome of summer, the strawberry…
