Food We Love: Hood Famous Bakeshop
And a purple haze cheesecake that will blow your mind
By Chelsea Lin February 6, 2017
This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Seattle magazine.
Meet the humble ube cheesecake, Hood Famous Bakeshop owner Chera Amlag’s nod to a Filipino flavor from childhood that she’s incorporated into her favorite dessert. Ube, for the uninitiated, is a purple yam native to Southeast Asia (you may have tried it locally in Full Tilt’s spectacular ube ice cream). At Hood Famous’ new kitchen (Ballard, 2325½ NW Market St.—entrance on Shilshole Avenue; hoodfamousbakeshop.com), with its tiny retail counter, enthusiastic Instagrammers can finally have easy access to the single-serving purple cakes ($4.99), which Amlag has been baking and selling wholesale to local markets for years. The flavor is subtler than you’d expect from such a vividly colored tuber, reminiscent of good vanilla but with a sweet potato-like earthiness, supported by a tender coconut cookie crust. Hood Famous has other Asian-influenced flavors, too—coconut pandan, white chocolate guava—but I can’t seem to resist that ube hue.
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