It’s been a while since I’ve consistently posted recipes on Substack. I’m not sure any of you even really pay attention to what I post on here, but normally I post all of my recipes from my social media accounts.
But over the last four or five months, I haven’t even really been baking that much. Like many of my peers, I’ve started to contemplate what working means for the rest of my life and my career. And the existential dread of having to bake every day for the next 10 years has left me uhhh…. well burned out.
I hope, on social media, the explicit lack of baking content wasn’t so obvious because ultimately, I’m still grateful that social media and baking can even still be considered a career. So here are some fun projects I’ve been doing in the meantime to reinvigorate my curiosity.
To reconnect with my love of baking and food, I recently did a pop-up at Matsunori Hand Roll Bar in LIC! I decided to make golden honey toast with a black sesame butter and strawberry jam in the middle, inspired by my love of Uncrustables.
I pre-batched all the honey toasts, and made all of the milk bread from scratch in my home kitchen, and day of, served all the toasts during restaurant service. I haven’t done a pop-up in two years, so there was definitely an adjustment. I struggled a lot to efficiently scale my recipes and to make multiple batches of toasts, but glad I can call myself a toast expert!
Did you peep the apron I was wearing at my pop-up? Over the past couple months, I’ve been working on developing these aprons, mostly as an excuse for me to wear a cute little croissant in all of my videos, but also as a way for you to have a cute piece for your kitchen.
Over the years, I’ve seen many cooking creators come out with their own products and their own aprons collaborations. I’ve always wanted to do one of these, but unfortunately I’m not cool enough to do that with a brand, so I just decided to make them myself instead.
Creating products and businesses by yourself is definitely a little daunting, but has been very exciting for me, since I get to learn so much about the process. I designed the apron and spoke with the manufacturers directly, directed my own makeshift photo shoot for all of the photography and assets, and built my own website using Vite and Cursor because I hate Shopify so much that I’d rather vibe code a website checkout flow and fulfillment database by myself.
All that’s to say, I really don’t recommend vibe coding your own website if you can stomach WordPress or Shopify. But that’s a rant for another time.
Since I did everything myself, I’m not sure if the economics of this actually work out, and I think I’ve lost more money than made along the way but I learned a lot, and hopefully this will help me one day if I ever wanted to start a consumer brand of my own.
As part of my new apron launch, I did, in fact, make a new website. Previously, I had one single recipe on my website because I could never figure out how to conveniently upload more, and using WordPress plugins and their backend was so frustrating. But because of the rise in “vibe coding,” I was able to somewhat quickly build my own website using my limited coding knowledge from college coding classes.
In addition to being the storefront for my aprons, I’ve also started the tedious process of uploading some of my most popular recipes onto the website. Honestly, I write out all of my recipes while I’m baking and testing them on Substack, so expect those recipes to still live here. But if you want a free version, they will be available on my website!
It’s not perfect, since I do have other responsibilities in my life besides vibe coding, but over time I’ll be filling it out more and more!
Honestly, I’d be really surprised if anyone makes it to the end of this. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read my thoughts and ramblings. If you made it this far, here’s a cute discount code, “KWASSON”, for 10% off of my aprons on my website!
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