Pastry Living is for all the bakers who love to bake at home for family and friends AND want to seriously level up their skills at the same time. From the comfort of your home! Get recipes you can trust with detailed instructions and essential tips so you can make the desserts successfully in your kitchen.
About Pastry Living
There are thousands of baking blogs in the world already, and what else can I offer to you? My answer is truly trusted recipes with hyper-detailed tips and tricks to boost your knowledge:
All the recipes I share here are tested multiple times until I feel it is the very best. For bakers of all levels, I try to make my recipes as simple as possible with clear processes.
But! Even if we can have the best recipes in the world, without all the essential tips, it just means a map with no clear path. In baking, we encounter all the problems that are often SO difficult to solve by ourselves. Because baking is a science. And it can be VERY complex.
After you soak up all the knowledge and polish your skills, you can recreate ANYTHING perfectly using ANY recipes you get. Because you know all the science of what will happen if you whip more or if you mix that way. Knowledge and skills are a lot more important than just recipes. They make you a killer pastry chef.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of online platforms that hugely lack that information. That is a big reason why I was not interested in blogging for years, to be honest. I thought we had to learn visually. I did not think I could explain all the tips and tricks in writing forms, especially because English is not my native language. But is that true...? can I...?
I started thinking I wanted to challenge myself and see how much I could accomplish.
My ultimate mission as a pastry instructor is that you accomplish your baking goal by building all the knowledge, skills and techniques that are essential to be there. - Maybe you want to open a shop, work online as a baker like myself, or improve your baking skills as a hobby.
Whatever that is, I want this place to be where you can learn a variety of valuable pastry knowledge and skills without going to a very expensive pastry school. I truly hope I can follow along with each of your baking journeys.
And as the name of this blog implies, I truly hope you will enjoy baking for yourself, your family, and your friends. Not just for duties or what you should do but as a tool to make your special moment and day even more exciting and heart-warming.
If you are also interested in learning visually from my videos, watch my YouTube channel. All the desserts I share here also have the video tutorial. Watch how I move and fasten your growth!
About Aya
I loved doing anything visually creative since I was little and baking was one of them. But did not think I want to go through that path then.
It was when I was studying economics at University, I was one of the students who are not sure what to do facing the coming up job-hunting season. One day I rented a DVD of Jamie Oliver ( I think it was Oliver's Twist!) and got so hooked up on it! I was drowned in the exciting world of his cooking shows. And that's when I seriously started thinking I might want to do it as a career.
I quickly applied for a cooking school and started taking classes. Cooking, bread, cake classes.. I took everything. I soon noticed I felt incredibly passionate about baking the most. After I graduated, I started working at the same cooking school as their instructor. That is the very beginning of my baking career.
Since then, I worked at one of my dream pastry shops in Tokyo as a pastry assistant, a few local bakeries as a lead pastry chef, and a local restaurant as a private pastry chef both in the united states.
For a decade, I had dreamt of working from home to fit into my lifestyle. And I finally leaped in 2019 and started my YouTube channel, Pastry Living with Aya to share all of the knowledge I know.
In 2022, I opened up my blog for anyone who prefers learning by reading thanks to my sister's advice. I'm quite new to this, and I'll probably struggle a lot to write, especially at the beginning. BUT! I'm confident I can deliver a lot of value here. I hope you follow along and watch me grow as your cake instructor-by-writing 🙂
A fun fact about me
- I love puzzles! I was even playing with them right before we were rushed to a hospital to give birth to my daughter. I can play for days and would never get bored doing it! (I guess my daughter was! lol)
- I love scary movies. Mummies, Zombies, ghosts, Pumpkin jacks... all the thrilling stuff!
- One of my bucket lists is to sing jazz songs at a little jazz bar. My husband is a drummer, so maybe it could be a little family gig!?
- My name, Aya means coloring in Japanese.
- I love ASMR! been watching their YouTube videos for more than a decade! Some of the OG I love are gentle whispering, DANA ASMR, etc.!