We're Obsessed With This Home Baker And Her Pretty Porcelain Donuts
This self-taught home baker’s creations are practically works of art
Who said art needed to be on a canvas and framed up on a wall? It can even come out of an oven and served on a plate, as Canadian home baker Grace’s Instagram account @petrichoro proved with her porcelain donuts.
Her tag line humbly states “home bakes, cooks, & occasionally
some art”, but one look at her Instagram feed and you realise that the art is
nowhere near occasional—every dish she has on there is a work of art.
Growing up in an East Asian household with parents who were quite
traditional in their food preferences, Grace was not exposed much to Western
cuisine at home—leave alone baked goodies.
So everything she bakes—and what adorns her Instagram feed—is self-taught and results from a lot of trial and error, by her own admission.
Considering that her first post under @petrichoro is from Apr 8 (during lockdown) and that she has garnered a following of 27k with just 37 posts, we find that a little hard to believe.
We will let you do the judging. Here are some of our favourites.
These beauties are inspired by Korean artist Jae Yong Kim’s porcelain artworks. But Grace’s creations are a treat for our palate and entirely edible. Look closely, and you will realise that each intricate pattern depicts a different scene—no wonder each took a staggering two to three hours to paint. This one surely deserves to be framed up. The 9,370 likes (and counting) say yay!
Grace baked this black sesame chiffon cake, layered with white chocolate and blueberry mousse as a Father’s Day treat. We know we had you at mousse, but the transparent agar agar almond jelly simply takes the cake. You may have seen jelly cakes decorated with botanicals, but rarely, if not never, one imagined as a koi pond. And yes, every bit of it—the koi, lily pads, and bamboo cattail stems—is edible. “I had so, so much fun working on the lilies and koi ,” she says, even though the cake took two days to make from start to finish. No surprise that the post raked up a staggering 20,336 likes almost instantly.
“Kimchi pork stir-fry is one of my favourite recipes because it uses ingredients that I can always find at home,” says Grace. But why settle for every-day stuff when you can have a Pikachu fried egg on top of it? Talk about upgraded lunches.
We have heard of art that looks good enough to eat, but have you ever come across food that is cuddle-worthy? Grace says she took 20 minutes just cutting the eyes out of nori for this dish. Now our dilemma—how can we eat something that is so darn cute!!
So you thought macarons were colourful and round meringue confections? Think again. These deliciously flavoured macarons—think pistachio, taro, matcha, Thai tea, chocolate and strawberry lemonade—are all “limited-edition” collectibles of My Neighbor Totoro. That is, if you don’t eat them.
Why make a regular cake when you can make it in the shape of Eeyore—“my favourite Disney character and I suspected he’d be just as cute in roll cake form”, she says. We can’t agree more.
Text: Sandhya Mahadevan