Everyone calls her Mumu. She was born and raised on O'ahu, with bare feet on warm lanai floorboards and the smell of plumeria drifting through the screen door. Hawai'i is, and always will be, home.
When she was young, she married her sweetheart — a man who would soon put on a uniform and serve his country for the better part of two decades. Together they packed and unpacked across the globe: Germany, Japan, Samoa, and a handful of small towns and cities on the mainland from Baltimore, Maryland to Seattle, Washington and everything in between.
In every new kitchen, Mumu did the same thing. She'd find the local market, befriend the auntie behind the bakery counter, and quietly collect recipes. A pinch of this in Samoa. The right way to fold mochi in Okinawa. A grandmother's leche flan tip in Manila. She brought every one of them home.
Today, Mumu blends all of that — the world she traveled and the islands that raised her — into homemade desserts. Butter mochi with a brown-butter twist. Malasadas filled with passionfruit curd. Tiramisu kissed with Kona coffee. Every treat carries a tiny piece of somewhere, served with aloha.
