hello!

I'm Zhanpei, but virtually everybody calls me PeiPei in real life. I'm 15 years old, and currently a sophomore in high school, in a suburb near Seattle. I have a passion for art, classic literature, science, and Reddit. I play the violin. I want to become a physicist, and my dream school is MIT. I'm obsessed with Lord of the Rings, musicals (currently, Les Mis), Avatar: the Last Airbender (and Legend of Korra), and Fullmetal Alchemist, among other fandoms. But none of those interests are why I made this blog, are they? It's all about the food.

My torrid affair with the culinary world began when I was a young girl, perusing the nonfiction shelves of the public library. I was, for some reason, drawn to cookbooks. I still can't explain why, but I read them as if they were the novels I also loved to read. I especially loved dessert cookbooks and books about foreign cuisines.

The practical application of the knowledge I absorbed, though, was yet to come. I had dabbled in some baking throughout childhood, including an undercooked, cakey batch of chocolate-chip cookies and ladyfingers that were little more than globs of foamy egg whites crusted onto an aluminum pie tin. It wasn't until 8th grade that my obsession began in earnest. When I was 13, I made my first successful batch of cupcakes, with a recipe I found on Food.com. Immediately, I was hooked. I made dozens upon dozens of cupcakes: a batch of chocolate cupcakes with mint-green frosting and decorated with Andes chocolates; a batch of vanilla with chocolate chips; a batch that were more like muffins, with diced-up plums that turned into jammy pockets of fruit. I looked up recipes in my spare time, and I gradually began expanding my horizons into other baked goods.

Now, I bake on a pretty regular basis. I have also begun actually cooking, too - I make my own breakfasts and lunches on school days. Funnily enough, I didn't start food photography until I started thinking about creating a blog. Photography just wasn't "my thing", in my opinion. But then I actually picked up a camera and took some shots, and I discovered that photography, too, was incredibly rewarding. I recently started posting my food photos on Facebook, which has won me the (possibly one-dimensional) reputation of being "that girl who takes delicious-looking photos of food".

I hope you enjoy my blog! It will be more of a chronicle of my cooking adventures than a source of information and recipes, I think, but I hope it will be a rewarding experience for the both of us.