hummingbird high’s 2018 review

Time for my annual lookback, where I review your favorite recipes and my favorite recipes. Ready for it? Here goes!

The following recipes are YOUR favorites from the year — that is, the most viewed recipes of mine from 2018. Similar to last year, you guys really loved my cakes! Most of the top recipes were cake related, but the most popular recipe of them all were for some fancified chocolate chip cookies. Because who doesn’t love a good chocolate chip cookie?!

1. Brown Butter and Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies

Although I’m aware of how much everybody loves chocolate chip cookies, I was surprised by how popular this one was! It’s actually just a re-published Bon Appetit recipe — I wasn’t even going to post it on the blog, but so many of y’all saw it on my Instagram Stories, flipped out, and kept asking for the recipe. Chocolate chip cookies rule forever, I guess.

2. Bomb Cyclone Black Sesame Cake

This crazy cake was inspired by New York City’s crazy winter weather at the start of the year. I have no idea how I came up with that idea, but I loved how it turned out in the end and you guys did too!

3. Homemade Carrara Marble Wedding Cake

I was literally obsessed with glazing everything with a carrara marble glaze — first these champagne cookies, then for a simple wedding cake for my friend’s wedding. So pretty and surprisingly simple to make too.

This cake was inspired by all of Portland’s pretty trees that blossom in the spring. For the cake, I used a specially sourced cherry blossom extract from Amazon. Totally worth it, I promise! Frosting the cake was also surprisingly easy to do — you just need to dab and quickly swipe small dollops of different colored pink frosting across the cake.

2. Chocolate Babka Morning Buns

As the self-proclaimed cinnamon roll queen, these chocolate babka morning buns were one of my more genius creations — they’re a cross between a babka and a cinnamon roll, and were my contribution to the awesome The Staub Cookbook.

3. Ube Layer Cake

2018 was the year of ube at Hummingbird High: I made ube cinnamon rolls, babka, and crinkle cookies with the Filipino purple yam. My favorite of all the desserts, however, was the ube layer cake which I made in honor of my blog’s SEVENTH birthday. I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for that long!

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Your Favorites on Instagram

Your favorites on Instagram this year included a wide range of fun recipes and bakes from this year and others, including this passionfruit and blueberry tart, this Vietnamese iced coffee cake, this chocolate chestnut yule log, Carl Sagan’s apple pie, and this ube layer cake.

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Thanks for following along, you guys! I have moderately big plans lined up for next year, including a return to more simple recipes and the launch of my cookbook (finally!), Weeknight Baking. Be sure to check out the highlights from the previous years: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012. Let’s keep baking in 2019!