5. Desserts for Breakfast
The Story
Stephanie Shih was born and raised in the Bay Area of California. She is a blogger, a photographer, a dessert designer, a traveller, as well as a researcher in linguistics. Her main focus in the science of languages is phonology, i.e. the way sounds produce patterns in everyday language, but also in poetry and music. Her work has been featured in Sated magazine and you can also check out her online portfolio as a professional photographer. Oh, yeah: and she almost exclusively eats dessert for breakfast!
The Blog
Since Stephanie is of Asian heritage, be sure that her blog heavily features some of the most exotic ingredients you could think of, from saffron to squid ink. At the same time, though her dessert recipes are of international inspiration, the occasional fortune cookie recipe pays homage to her roots. Stephanie has allowed all her sources of inspiration and passions to seep into the blog – it contains an awesome index of all the places she’s traveled to. She started off the blog as a way to collect the photos of her cooking projects, but soon enough the recipe requests started pouring in, forcing her to turn it into a full-fledged blog. Since then, she’s honed both her writing and her photo skills and is one of our top discoveries of culinary bloggers specializing in desserts in recent times!
Blog Metrics
PR – 5/10
DA – 53
Alexa Rank – 422,337
Fans & Followers – Follow Stephanie on Instagram, where she’s already got over 2.5k fans, or become her fan on Facebook, alongside the other 8k fans
Foodie Philosophy
“I like to think that [the blog is] a way for me to share my food with lots of people, which is one of the things that brings me the greatest joy in life.”
As many other culinary bloggers, Stephanie most enjoys sharing and experimenting. She uses her blog as a platform to test out her own recipes, recipes discovered from others, as well as get feedback from her global audience. Check out some of her most amazing experiments in the small gallery below.
Signature Recipes
4. Sprinkle Bakes
The Story
Heather Baird lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, and is a food blogger, as well as a crafter, whose work you can find featured on Etsy, as well as on the Betty Crocker website. She’s into a lot of things, included, but certainly not limited to: coffee, snow globes, pugs, matcha tea, snow, Batman, Star Trek, cotton candy, birthdays, and Tori Amos’s album Under the Pink. She supports the World Food Bank, as well as an NGO that enables people to remotely ‘adopt’ elephants in danger. When it comes to taking pictures, she uses a Canon EOS 5$ Mark III with a 50mm 1.4 lens, but will sometimes also shoot on film, given her love for Polaroid-like images and Lomography.
The Blog
It’s not at all difficult to figure out that the creative force behind this food blog has got a serious background in art. Heather has formal fine art training and spent many years as a painter and gallery assistant for other artists, be they painters, sculptors, glass blowers, illustrators, and print makers. She still paints to this day, but has realized that she enjoys pouring out her creativity into cooking best. In her own words, “I’m most fulfilled when lost in a cloud of powdered sugar, assembling desserts that are as artful as they are delicious.” The blog is a collection of family secrets, original recipes, and adaptations. It eventually made a book happen, which took “nearly 2 years and 75 lbs. of sugar” to write, according to its author. For her, the book is a dream come true, which brings together two of her main passions: baking and art. The book, titled Sprinkle Bakes: Dessert Recipes to Inspire Your Inner Artist can be purchased online here.
Blog Metrics
PR – 5/10
DA – 63
Alexa Rank – 163,738
Fans & Followers – Find Sprinkle Bakes on all the popular social networks: Tumblr, Instagram (+5k followers, pics of her pugs included!), Twitter, and Facebook (a whopping 139k fans and the place you will find her most often)
Foodie Philosophy
“The name [of the blog] was born from my love of rainbow nonpareils. They remind me to have fun in life and to not take things too seriously. They are joyful, colorful, interesting, special. And concerning dessert, that’s just how I like it!”
The above description is very fitting for this blog, which is an explosion of color and goodness – it’s the foodie representation of ‘sugar, spice, and everything nice’, with pictures and dessert recipes included! If you need a pick-me-up in the form of a sugary treat, or, at the very least, pictures of sugary treats, then Sprinkle Bakes is definitely your go-to solution!
Signature Recipes
3. Willow Bird Baking
The Story
Julie Ruble comes from a family in the Midwest, who took food quite seriously, and in which everyone had to do their share: as a child, she was in charge of the rice pilaf, while her grandma made the biscuits and gravy, her dad took care of the chicken and dumplings, and her mom handled all the rest, with a slather of buttercream added on top. As she puts it, her family “blazed a trail of fried chicken, homemade macaroni, and angel biscuits”, which, in time, inspired her to start her own cooking blog. Nowadays she lives in the South, in Charlotte North Carolina, and says of herself that she is “a writer in love with monumental, stirring images”, but also “a wrangler of ingredients and kitchen utensils”. There is a lot of soul in her recipes, her pictures, and all the inspired writing on her cooking blog.
The Blog
Willow Bird Baking is subtitled “lessons in life & kitchen confidence”, which says a lot about the warm and inviting tone it sets. It’s as much about experimenting, failing, discovering, and making a mess, as it is about cooking success. Julie started cooking relatively late in life, right after college, and she started out small, with a simple pan of cupcakes for her boyfriend Mike. She continued to hone her skills and realized that it’s interesting to peruse the achievements accomplished by others in their kitchens. More than that, though, achieving things in your own kitchen is life changing. This is why she blogs about cooking, but, most of all, she blogs about honing one’s own kitchen confidence. The title of the blog comes from her rescue pet poodle Byrd, whom she adopted in April 2008, and who changed Julie’s life forever.
Blog Metrics
PR – 4/10
DA – 48
Alexa Rank – 480,273
Fans & Followers – Join Julie and her community of 10k fans on Facebook, follow her alongside 3.1k others on Twitter, or add her to your circles on Google+
Foodie Philosophy
“I love the challenge of a new recipe, and I love the community created by baking, sharing, eating, and communicating about food. I’ve got a warm space in my heart dedicated to impressing the people I love with something that tastes amazing.”
To Julie, food and cooking are all about sharing, which is probably a big part of the reason for which her blog is mostly about baking. You’ll find a lot of goodies there, from cheesecakes and pies, to savory tarts and ‘cupfakes’. She’s all about sharing – and it certainly shows! Here’s a sample of her wonderful creations below.
Signature Recipes
2. Bakers Royale
The Story
Bakers Royale is a blog started in 2010 by Naomi, who simply describes herself as a wife, mother, and self-taught baker. She’s very much the articulate writer and is always thoughtful enough to source her recipes, provide news and updates on all the latest apps and tools she uses, and will also feature blog giveaways, for brands looking to reach an audience passionate about cooking and creating majestic details. Her style is equally fun-loving and thorough, which makes her blog both a treat for your palate and sore eyes, as well as a great read, when browsing the web on the daily.
The Blog
The blog is equal parts baking, equal parts thought and musings. It includes some of the most spectacular dessert photography we’ve ever seen on the web – and most pictures are taken by Naomi herself. Similarly, most (but not all) dessert recipes are Naomi’s creation, but she does also include recipes found online, in magazines, newspapers, or on TV. She does her best to keep the ingredients and list of required equipment at a bare minimum, yet will also feature fancier treats for special occasions, which may involve some work. Best of all, the blog features some amazing tutorials for baking and decoration techniques, such as the one for the Rose Cake featured above.
Blog Metrics
PR – 5/10
DA – 60
Alexa Rank – 84,563
Fans & Followers – +26k fans on Facebook for Naomi Robinson’s Bakers Royale, plus some 3.6k Instagram followers – her photo stream also includes personal updates of her life spent as a mother and wife
Foodie Philosophy
“Have fun and don’t worry about the failures, learn from them and throw out most conventions to find your creativity. Of course, there are rules that help towards creating successful recipes, but beyond that, let’s just agree to go for it. Food is all about the experience it brings to you and those you share it, so no one can say what is right or wrong.”
If you’re looking to hone your baking and/or dessert preparation skills, Bakers Royale is truly one of the most inspirational corners of the web you could ever come across. Aside from tarts, tortes, muffins, cupcakes, and the like, Naomi’s blog also features a hefty dose of breakfast ideas, breads, bars, cookies, etc. – plus an awesomely useful Baking Basics series for all the newbies out there.
Signature Recipes
1. Joy the Baker
The Story
“Meet Joy. The girl. The baker. No biggie.” It doesn’t take more than this catchy tag-line in the About section of the blog to realize this girl not only has some serious baking prowess, but she also has quite the sense of humor. Joy is in her thirties and says she learned her baking from herself, her family, and her own taste buds. Speaking of her family, whom she mostly credits for teaching her a lot of the things she knows now about baking, her dad’s credentials include “a mean Sweet Potato Pie”, while her mom is the proud author of this “really weird purple hot dog casserole”. All jokes aside, Joy is pretty, funny, talented, and lives in L.A., where she also works, eats, attends cocktail parties, and takes care of all the “related horsing around”. She launched her website in January 2008. She lives with her adorable red tabby cat Jules Steven, is in love with anything that contains the word ‘cake’, shoots with a borrowed Canon 5D, and her favorite thing to bake is apple pie. Since the popularity of her blog skyrocketed, her business has expanded to include so much more than just the website – but more on that below.
The Blog
This is one culinary blogger who has become a regular household name and accomplished entrepreneur in her own right. The blog has spun off a cook book published in 2012 (with a contract for two more on the way), a web series, a series of podcasts, and an impressive number of features, both online, as well as in mainstream media. You may think it’s all about desserts and other scrumptious baked goods… well, let us tell you that Joy the Baker is about so much more: she’s been featured as one of the Top Fifty Food Bloggers in the World by the London Times, Foodbuzz, and even Forbes Magazine. Her photography and food styling has appeared in Glamour, Food and Wine Magazine, and a ton of other publications. Since, she has launched a website called Home Fries, which features several podcast series, and, best of all, she has “made an immeasurable amount of friends in people like you”.
Blog Metrics
PR – 5/10
DA – 73
Alexa Rank – 43,855
Fans & Followers – Joy is a Facebook sensation, with more than 65k fans and has some 47k followers on Pinterest alone
Foodie Philosophy
“The blog is powered by WordPress, an unbelievable amount of granulated sugar, and a sometimes unreasonable desire to share with you all of my kitchen happenings.”
That’s Joy in a nutshell for you: fun, lighthearted, trying to show the world that all of the amazing goodies she produces are easy for everyone to achieve – which is exactly what a good blogger should do, be they dessert bloggers, or blogging about anything else on the face of the planet. Check out the pictures below, to get a feel of her style, both in terms of pictures, as well as of food styling.