Fresh out of college, I received an offer I could not resist: Spend three months in Japan to design futuristic video game environments for the PlayStation console. The year was 1998, and instead of a culture shock, I experienced more of a culture bath, where I soaked up everything that Tokyo’s pop and culinary world had to offer. Among other things, I tried food I could not identify, let alone pronounce. One day, I was confronted with the mental challenge of trying raw fish for the first time, which went really well until my tongue came in contact with the wasabi that was hiding between the salmon and the rice. My taste buds were lost in translation.
I would gaze at the indescribable sense of fashion that was on loud display in the Harajuku district and be amazed that only a few steps away, I could disappear into the silence surrounding the Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park. The contrast between the past and the future was ever-present and fascinated my senses. What, I wandered, makes this place so incredibly different from everything I had known and embraced as “normal”?
In my thirst to learn more, I sampled everything I could wrap my German head around. With the Japanese language being quite challenging for me, one of my refuges was Tower Records in Shibuya, a five-story flagship store with a great mix of English and Japanese content. It was there that I sampled early versions of J-Pop and serendipitously got introduced to the music by a band called “Puffy”, a female pop rock duo that had just released a new album called “Jet CD”.
One of their tracks caught me completely off guard; it was called “Cake is Love.” Only the refrain was in English; the rest of the song was in Japanese. To this day, I have no idea what they were singing about, except every time they reached the refrain, I would join the chorus and loudly sing along: “Cake is Love”. To me, there was something so profoundly mysterious about this song and its strange title that I have carried the essence of these three words with me ever since. It is a way for me to see the light instead of the shadow and not take myself too seriously.
After all, Cake is Love.
Fast forward about a decade or so. I had fallen in love with my best friend and the love of my life, Wakako, and we tied the knot. Then, in 2010, shortly after Wakako gave birth to our first daughter, she also gave life to an idea that she had been playing with for a while. Up until then, she had been running a popular lifestyle blog, and she had plans to turn it into something more than that —a place to share her stories and also artifacts that resonated with her. It would be a store, living out of our garage, and open to the world via the internet. All that was missing was a name.
Without fully knowing what would eventually be housed under that name, we were more concerned with what it would mean to us rather than its literal representation. So Baum-kuchen it was, a German cake of origin, perfected by the food-obsessed culture of Japan. It was a symbolic intersection of our individual backgrounds coming together as “Layers of Happiness,” as it is often referred to. The actual cake, when sliced, resembles the rings of a tree, and we liked the idea of adding layers to one’s life, gaining experiences, wisdom, and some patina along the way.
This year, 2025, marks the 15th year of our Baum-kuchen journey, and it is a reason to celebrate this milestone and give thanks to those who joined us along the way and made it happen. To our team, our customers and partners I want to say thank you and we love you, this 15th ring is only here because of you.
And because Cake is Love.
Over this Summer, I have begun a small passion project, which is to collect and illustrate some of our “Germanese” family recipes. It gives me a lot of joy to comb through the dishes that I like to cook or that I remember growing up with and that I recreate for our family. And since these recipes are in notes, books, and binders, I am in the beginning process of composing them together into one volume so that I would finally, finally, have them in one place.
This will not be a cookbook per se, but rather a collection of recipes. Ever since I landed in Japan, my fascination with their culture has spilled over into my passion for cooking as well. Not knowing anything about their flavors has fueled my curiosity for wanting to learn how to re-create them. At this point, I cook more Japanese-inspired dishes than German ones. And that proportion also makes sense if we think about the popularity of restaurants from each culture: A typical German restaurant is really just a beer garden that also happens to serve food.
However, a German bakery will always win my heart, and this project, of course, needs to include the family cake recipes. And so as I am gathering them together, I made a curious discovery for myself: All of our cake recipes were actually handwritten by my mother and then sent to me in the mail. Mostly cakes, and also a few other sweet things. As I had left home to attend college, she would frequently send me letters and include recipes with a note saying something similar to, “Here is a quick cake you can bake!”
I did not try all of the recipes, as my college life often had different priorities that did not include baking cakes. On the other hand, I do remember regularly bringing a home-baked cake to friends’ birthday parties, which would always be met with a surprised “Did you make that from scratch?” Back then, I found that to be a strange question. After all, how else would you bake deliciousness if not from scratch?
I have never asked my mom why she has sent me so many cake recipes over the years, but I do know she loves cake. And perhaps that contains the clue that if you love someone, you share with them what you love yourself.
And so indeed, Cake is Love, always and forever.
//
PS:
Omi’s Lemon Cake
300 grams butter (at room temperature)
300 grams flour
300 grams sugar
1 lemon (zest and juice)
1 teaspoon baking powder
5-6 eggs, separated
Combine all ingredients and separately whip the egg whites stiff.
Gently fold the egg whites under the batter.
Bake for 40+ minutes at 180°C (350°F). Test with a wooden stick if it is done.
Glazing: combine a few drops of lemon juice with powdered sugar.
❖ Bk Artifacts Featured:
- [Roterfaden] "Trust the Process" Notebook (A5)
- [Tombow MONO] Holder Eraser
-
[Art Toolkit] Pocket Palette
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