What I've Been Cooking Lately - June 2025 Edition

The rise and fall of the mini-cake.

Jul 02, 2025

I feel like I cooked a lot this month, but my camera roll would say I barely chef’d at all this month.

No Pain, No Gain Main Dishes

Lobster Eggs Benny

I love lobster so much and I wish someone would just get me like 3 cooked lobsters and a pitcher of margartitas whenever I accomplish anything worthwhile (which is rare these days).

I picked up an $8 can of minced lobster as a treat at the grocery store with 2 goals in mind: Lobster eggs benny and a lobster roll.

It was my first time making hollandaise and unfortuately it was not the consistency it needed to be- this was more melted butter and less creamy, thick goodness (That’s what she said).

Watch the making of this over on TikTok.

Braised Pork Belly, Apple-Cabbage-Carrot Slaw, Seared Bok Choy & Rice

I cooked for my boyfriend’s parents because I love them and they love my cooking (and me).

They have ‘Marry Me’ dishes, but do they have ‘Make Your Parents Like Me So Much They Will Pressure You To Marry Me Sooner’ meals? (I’m kidding)

I did a braised pork belly (like I did last month to go with the Creamy Miso Udon I made) that went over some plain rice. I seared some bok choy halves, and had a fresh apple, cabbage, and carrot coleslaw (unpictured) on the side to bring some crunch and brightness to the meal!

Sweeties and Treaties

The Mini-Cakes Chronicle

So last month I said, “maybe I should become a chef”. I was trying to think of an easy but delicious food product I could make and sell that could warrant maybe a booth at a farmers market.

Everyone’s making sour dough, everyone’s got jam and preserves. Does anybody have very niche cake flavors in a single-serving size? Not to my knowledge (locally).

Did Marie Antoinette really say 'Let them eat cake'? | Live Science

I made a very detailed spreadsheet breaking down costs and I felt very prepared to take this on as a small business endeavour. I set myself some dates to announce the cake orders opening- but first I needed to actually bake and photograph the cakes.

So, I used this sponge cake recipe and came up with 3 flavors I thought would taste delicious:

An Earl Grey tea flavored cake that would be paired with a lemon icing
A matcha cake with strawberry icing
A simple marble (chocolate and vanilla) cake except I would make it blue and call it a “bluebell” cake (the color, blue, plus the ‘ble’ of marble)

So I split the dough into thirds, flavored them up accordingly, popped them in the oven, and started praying to the baking gods this would not be a waste of ingredients.

This was the little menu I made up that would be posted alongside photos of the cakes.

The cakes baked fine! The bluebell cake did not turn out a very appetizing color and the marble-ness was hard to see.

Onto icing! Surely I cannot mess this up, right?

I started with lemon: A simple buttercream recipe with a little bit of lemon juice and zest. Using some “borrowed” piping bags and tips from my mom, I piped on to the cake as good as I could do! I even garnished the top with a few lemon twists!

Bingo! First cake down and it turned out great. I decided to do the matcha cake next as I figured the strawberries in the icing would need a little bit of time to set before I started styling the food photoshoot later in the day.

So I made the same buttercream recipe, and mashed up some strawberries and added them in. The icing turned a lovely blushy pink shade and it tasted so fresh with the real strawberries, as opposed to just a flavoring.

I loaded up the piping bag I “borrowed” from my mom and was getting ready to start putting a little design around, when suddenly the icing would not budge.

I didn’t realize the strawberries were going to get stuck in the piping tip, and that squeezing the bag harder and harder would just lead to “icing blowouts”. (Yes, I am that stupid.)

The icing started to run. A lot. I realized I basically had to do this as fast as possible and then get it in the freezer and hopefully it would get so cold so quickly it would stop running and it would be salvagable.

That’s not what happened…

But I could fix that later! I still had one more cake to do!

For the bluebell cake, I wanted to do a marbled icing. I had seen videos of this before: Basically you put each color in it’s own piping bag, put those 2 bags inside of 1 bag, and it’ll come out side by side!

Now, I’m sure you’ve realized at this point I was using my mother’s piping bags, and I think I’m a fairly good daughter. I didn’t want to waste them all, lest she need the specific amount left in the box.

So I figured I could use just regular plastic bags! And not good plastic bags! Some cheap dollar-store ones that Goldfish can tear a hole through! Nothing can go wrong here!

Also featuring the leftover batter cupcakes with the smears of their corresponding icing.

It went very wrong. Like, very wrong. It basically exploded internally, and then externally all over the cake. There was no saving it. 2 out of the 3 cakes were visually fucked now. There went like $25 worth of ingredients and hours of planning, prepping, and baking.

So, long story short- I’m not going to make and sell mini-cakes in bulk. But friends, hit me up to make your birthday cakes. I promise they will look better than these:

Also I made this TikTok that accidentally blew up in comparison to the views I normally get (6,000+ to an average of 200-400).

Rhubarb Upside-Down Yogurt Cake

Find the recipe here on emilylawrence.ca

Very cool Nova Scotia recipe creator alert! I had saw a few people in my social media circles try out this cake and I was hell-bent on getting some rhubarb to make it myself.

I picked some up at a local market and got baking! It turned out delicious and didn’t last 12 hours between me, my boyfriend, and the cake’s field trip to my parent’s house.

I filmed the whole thing for TikTok as well.

Matcha Cake with Glazy Brown Sugar Icing

I baked one of my dear friend’s birthday cake the other night! She specifically requested a matcha cake with brown sugar icing. I used my tried and true matcha cake recipe here as well as (my unofficial) cousin Martha’s brown sugar icing here.

The icing turned out more like a glaze, but holy hell did this cake hit hard. It was delicious.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

To finish off my one-night stint as my future in-law’s private chef, I made a pie for the first time! Granted I did use pre-made dough, but I stewed rhubarb and strawberries down with some sugar to make a sweet and sour pie filling. It turned out all right! I definitely need to work on my pie-crust-crinkling skills, but hey, I was a pie-making-virgin!

And that’s what I made in June! I have a teeny tiny garden started so hopefully some tomatoes pop up soon. Let me know your favorite recipies so I can try them next month!

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