There's something simple, but exceedingly special about Tawjan Catherine Punyasingh's recently released cookbook Great Food Good Fest. A quick skim through would evoke the same reflex of going "awww" at dog pictures, except there are squid and salted egg lava buns in these pictures, instead. Something about it just warms your heart and fills you with a pressing urge to get up to make these dishes, even if you are the type that couldn't cook to save yourself. Perhaps it is the book's realistic nature, and as we meet at her home, she whips up a strawberry hazelnut chocolate tart and pumpkin and corn croquette for us -- something even the most hopeless can make this holiday season.
That the author is also the owner of pioneer Facebook bakery Bite Me Softly, which tallies a 37,000-strong following, it's safe to say that Tawjan can make some of the best brownies (and cakes, pies and cookies) in the business. Yet, her book includes savoury main courses too, with hearty recipes such as a beef Wellington for New Year's and an orange honey mustard glazed ham for Christmas.
"It's always been a dream for me to have a cookbook that doesn't just have recipes and pictures," says the 33-year-old. "I wanted to include stories and reasons why it had to be this way and not all food book publishers are open to that, but I was lucky here with Bun Books." Out of the 30 menus for 10 celebratory occasions throughout the year, the book is also filled with fun hybrids, like Chinese steamed cake trifle, a creative way to use any traditional sponge cake leftovers from Chinese New Year, or chilli nama chocolate -- a St Valentine's day menu to help lamenting lovers snap out of the heartbroken funk.
For someone who's been in the kitchen since she was three, surrounded by talented cooking family members, and making her own food from middle school onward, her Cordon Bleu qualifications seem like a mere paper guarantee for a skill already long running deep in her veins. It was inevitable that Tawjan would become the poster child of a millennial's baking dream: Bite Me Softly was a side job, but it snowballed into a full-time business because her food tasted so good and she was making much more money baking than her office job.
Far from being dreamy-eyed, Tawjan first started out Bite Me Softly five years ago with only one whisk, bowl, spatula, oven and 20,000 baht in her late twenties. It was an era when selling baked goods online was still relatively new, but even with little competition, the chef warns hopefuls that there are downsides to being a pioneer.
Tawjan's recently released cookbook.
"If your product isn't strong enough, you'll become a staircase for other people to step on," she explains while cutting up the juicy strawberries. "If your product is embraced by the market, then you're lucky because you get to be the first. What's really scary are people who see what others before them do and have more money, because they're the ones who can outmatch you. You need to find ways to keep your ground so I try to come up with new menus all the time -- if copycats can keep up with my new lines every month, then so be it."
Initially, the lover of American comfort food wanted to attend cooking school right out of high school, but had to succumb to getting two degrees and office jobs first, thanks to familial and societal pressure. But if anything, her past experiences were necessary to the success of Bite Me Softly, clearly indicating that selling cookies online is no child's play.
"It's not enough to just know how to bake," she stresses. "If you know how to run a business but don't know how to bake, you can just go learn how to bake and you'd survive. But conversely, you won't make it -- just going to Cordon Bleu doesn't mean you'll be successful.
"I started this comparatively late, so I didn't have time to experiment and fail. I had to get my return on investment within a month because I was a still salary slave. Even today, with the market so packed, you can't really afford to experiment, but if you're still young, just go for it."
Having studied film for her undergraduate degree, Tawjan is able to convert her knowledge of pretty pictures into pretty food. She easily amps up our crispy croquettes with some tricoloured diced veggies, explaining that decorating food is just like trying to compose a picture: balancing the colours and creating a point of interest are crucial. "But it needs to feed on the taste too, so don't just stick a basil leaf on a cake!"
Steps to make chilli nama chocolate.
This skill has enabled her to work as a food stylist at times, mainly catalogue work for her old employers, such as Gateaux House and Central Restaurant Group. When it comes to food styling however, Tawjan says the uneasy truth about that world is that nothing about it is real.
"Oh god, it's all morbidly fake," she exclaims. "If you eat it, you could possibly die. You need to practically forget what food is in order to create whatever it is the client wants. Glue, gum, sprays or even wires to hold it all together.
"When you work with a lot of fake things, I just don't find it tasty-looking anymore -- it just looks good. It doesn't make me feel like I want to eat it, so when I take photos of my food, I want real pictures. It doesn't have to look like 5-star food but can look delicious too."
It comes as no surprise that all the photographs for her book are the first (and only) batch of each menu, all styled by herself and taken in her own homely kitchen by her boyfriend. Unruffled about her Black Forest cake, which looks a tad droopy, she says: "I feel that people need to see the real thing. How else would they know how it's supposed to look like? Western cookbooks have extremely beautiful photos, but it's all mock-up. When readers make the food and it doesn't look the same, they feel dejected and I don't want that."
As she repeatedly mentions throughout the book, a meal becomes more special simply because it is made by you for your loved ones. Tawjan will obviously be cooking for her family this holiday (we would be too if we could cook as well as her) and her advice to all is unceremoniously simple to follow: "Practice immediately. Just go shopping and get right down to it. If it doesn't come through, don't be discouraged and just keep practicing. Cooking isn't just a gift -- a lot of it is practice and everyone can do it if you just try."
Great Food Good Fest is available at major bookstores nationwide for 299 baht. For Bite Me Softly's baked goods, visit www.facebook.com/bMeSoftly to place an order.
Leftover traditional sponge cakes from Chinese New Year can be made into a modern cake trifle.
Squid and salted egg lava buns.
Tawjan's easy-to-make menus for the holiday season
