Joyce Tang & Soleil Ho Author Event • Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats

Joyce Tang started her career in tech at Facebook, but left to enroll in culinary school in 2015. She began working in bakeries and restaurants all over the Bay Area and landed herself an externship at the three-Michelin-starred El Celler de Can Roca while three months pregnant. She counts herself as the first woman to have ever breastfed while working at the illustrious decades-old Catalonian establishment. Joyce founded Bake Sum as a pop-up bakery in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, and the bakery has since grown into a pink storefront in Oakland where she delights fans with her fluffy, colorful, and creative takes on pastry. 

Soleil Ho is an award-winning food and culture writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2019, they became The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic, going on to win the James Beard Foundation’s Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award in 2022. In 2025, they co-founded the COYOTE Media Collective, a worker-owned news outlet for the Bay Area. Their diverse writing portfolio includes restaurant reviews, opinion columns, and investigative journalism, while their published works include the graphic novel Meal, contributions to several anthologies, and the 2024 cookbook The Memory of Taste, co-authored with Oakland-raised chef Tu David Phu. Other contributions include behind-the-scenes work on books including Our South (2024) and the forthcoming The Ice Cream Queen (2026).

Bake Sum- Organized by level of difficulty, the book guides readers through classic Asian puddings & jellies like Almond Jello, Mango Pudding, and Taho (sweet silken tofu), before moving on to the bakery’s famous sesame-studded and matcha scented cookies, beautiful layer cakes, tarts and pies of all kinds–from an Egg Custard Tart to Miso Apple Turnovers–and eventually lands in bread, then laminated pastry. Learn the secrets of the bakery’s NYT-lauded Croissubi, a spam musubi-croissant hybrid, how to make a perfect milk bread, and how to work with ingredients and flavors like yuzu, black sesame, ube, pandan, and hojicha.   

Peppered amongst the desserts, snacks, and drinks are essays on the migration of culture and taste through food. Learn how the concha traveled from North America in the gold-rush era to Hong Kong and became what’s now known as a Chinese pineapple bun, plus recipes to make hybrid versions full of ube pastry cream and red beans that burst off the page.

Joyce Tang started her career in tech at Facebook, but left to enroll in culinary school in 2015. She began working in bakeries and restaurants all over the Bay Area and landed herself an externship at the three-Michelin-starred El Celler de Can Roca while three months pregnant. She counts herself as the first woman to have ever breastfed while working at the illustrious decades-old Catalonian establishment. Joyce founded Bake Sum as a pop-up bakery in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, and the bakery has since grown into a pink storefront in Oakland where she delights fans with her fluffy, colorful, and creative takes on pastry.