We made a K-pop cover and a cake in under 2 hours!

Cover of "Friday" (금요일에 만나요) - IU with Yi-Jeong of History by Anna + Cindy

Last week I got to hang out with a friend from UCSD (also from the a cappella community and a K-pop lover!), Anna, and we made a little somethin somethin for y'all listen to! Kudos to her for editing in the bloopers as well, so stayed tuned until the end for those ;) Make sure to subscribe to her YouTube channel, and to check out her Japan and Korea vlogs!

It feels so good to come back to my K-pop grind and to sing all my guilty pleasure songs again—especially because I've mostly been singing English Jazz standards in preparation for gigs lately. I actually powered through a lot of my early days of learning guitar by using K-pop guitar tutorials to learn the chords to my favorite songs. Shout out to the Caffeine Guitar channel and this video for teaching me how to play this song in particular. 

But... that's not it! We also baked an entire cake!

How badass are we for making an entire cover while before our cake finished baking? This day was really a creative and productive stay-at-home day. It feels therapeutic to create something like music or food, which is nearly not as stressful as creating code, for example.

The story behind this creative day? After posting numerous posts about my baking adventures on Instagram, I found out that Anna loved to bake and cook as well. So we decided to get together to bake this Blood Orange Black Sesame Loaf Cake, courtesy of this recipe I found on Pinterest.

I'm really loving the pink color that the blood orange juice creates for the icing of this cake. I've seen so many bakeries around San Francisco incorporate black sesame into their items these days. I recently tried the Orange Sesame Cake from Tartine Manufactory and the Black Sesame Banana Bread from Provender Coffee. After realizing that sesame gives an interesting (even savory, I would say?) flavor to balance out the sweetness of baked goods, I was eager to come back home to try it myself.

Aren't you proud of me for composing two blog posts in under two days? <rant> This is because I finally finished a big chunk of a project at work and now I'm finally spending some quality time with my hobbies rather than coding until 4AM on weekends. (I'm still typing this blog post at 2AM on a Sunday, but it somehow feels more reasonable) In other words, my job is too stress-inducing and maybe I should try to transition into a role that's better for someone who has bad anxiety issues already. </rant> Whatever. Good night y'all.

♥ Cindy