Molly Yeh’s 'Sweet Farm' Is Her First Desserts-Only Cookbook

If it were possible for a cookbook to be the literary version of that tight hug from your friend-you-haven’t-seen-in-forever-but-don’t-miss-a-beat-once-back-together, then it would be Molly Yeh’s Sweet Farm, a cookbook dedicated to her love of all things sweet.

Intertwined amid her hundreds of seriously delicious and unique dessert recipes are funny anecdotes from Molly that are equal parts adorably disarming and wildly impressive. This is a woman who will whip up a sophisticated lavender lemon loaf but casually describe it as the culinary equivalent of being transported to “a picnic on a sunny seventy-degree day where the birds are chirping, your hair looks great, and the bugs got the memo to stay the heck away from your cake.” In short, she makes you feel like you could live on a farm and happily bake away the days.

Since most of us cannot actually pack up and move to Minnesota, which is where Molly lives and works using ingredients from her husband’s family sugar beet farm, this cookbook is a solid way to pretend that you have.

Let’s first talk about the subject matter. There are 300-plus pages dedicated to sweets. Full stop.

There’s even an entire chapter titled “Salads." Spoiler alert: these are not what you’re thinking; dessert "salads" lovingly pay homage to retro Midwest church cookbook recipes that combine ingredients like whipped topping, cookies, fruit and nuts, resulting in Molly's Classic Candy Bar Salad. For someone like me, who had no idea that there were enough candy bar salads out in the world to have finally found the "classic" recipe, I was completely intrigued.

Molly expertly mixes her Chinese-Jewish family roots and Midwestern surroundings, making her recipes unbelievably unique. Mandel bread cereal, miso toffee crackers, tahini fudge pie and peanut butter halva are all served up right alongside sugar cookie bars, vanilla creme-filled doughnuts and blueberry cream cheese bagel chip salad (duh!). Sweet Farm is a charming dessert journey around the world filled with, in Molly’s words, “unexpected flavors that tell a story."

So, let’s tell some stories. We sat down with Molly to talk everything Sweet Farm and Girl Meets Farm Season 15.

Your recipes are such fun cross-cultural collaborations. Is it hard to break those cultural barriers? Full disclosure, my (Jewish) dad would have things to say if I tried to serve him black sesame babka.

The hardest thing is facing people like your dad who need convincing to try such a delicious thing! But I also understand having such strong ties to traditional flavors and recipes (I still regret trying to make an Asian matzo ball soup … it was tasty but just not the same). For me, flavors like black sesame, tahini, red bean, rosewater and sumac are so nostalgic and familiar, they're my pantry staples, so combining them in delicious combinations, no matter what tradition dictates, feels natural to me. If black sesame in a babka tastes delicious, why not do it? The cool thing about the time that we live in is that all of these ingredients that didn't used to be available in, say, a small town in northern Minnesota are now available. So, I like to think about how the only reason that my husband's ancestors on this farm did not fold black sesame paste into their snow ice cream and top it with matcha mochi is simply because they didn't have access to black sesame paste, mochiko flour and matcha powder, not because it wasn't the "correct" way of doing things.

So many of your recipes combine ingredients that raise some eyebrows. Is there any one recipe that you had to convince your editors to include?

No. My editor, Cassie, is very supportive of my style and the types of recipes I like to highlight. Didn't even say a peep about the Velveeta Fudge.

You dedicate an entire chapter to dessert salads in this book. Tell us about the most memorable dessert salad you were ever served and how it may have translated into one of the recipes you feature in Sweet Farm.

My husband's sister's husband's dad's brother-in-law's sister has this famous fluff recipe that everyone was raving about during a potluck a few years ago on Fourth of July. A fluff is a subset of salads that typically consists of Jell-O, Cool Whip and maybe some fruit. This particular fluff was made special by the addition of tapioca pudding. I felt so Midwestern scooping the fluff onto my plate right next to the hotdish. When I tasted it and had the tapioca, I was reminded of the bubble tea that I would get in Chinatown growing up and that suddenly made me crave ube. So to me, the combination of ube and tapioca made sense, and that's where the ube fluff recipe came from.

You make a “passionate plea” in the book for home cooks to weigh their ingredients rather than to measure them. You even go so far as to give step-by-step directions on how to do this. Tell us why you find this so integral to baking?

It makes results more accurate because, for example, you'll have the exact same amount of flour every single time. If you were to try to measure a cup of flour with a measuring cup three different times, you'd actually get three different amounts because of how flour can get compacted in the cup. And if you have too much flour, the final result could be too dry. Not enough and it might not have enough structure. Baking is so precise, so weighing ingredients simply helps with that precision. Also, it cuts down on dirty dishes and eliminates the need to have to hunt through your drawers to find specific measuring cups.

In your book, you introduce potato flour as your preferred flour for a lot of your recipes. How did you discover this addition?

I started adding mashed potatoes to my challah one Rosh Hashanah and loved the texture but hated the extra step of having to cook and mash potatoes. So, potato flour became my shortcut! It adds the same soft quality without the extra step.

As a mother to a mother, I would never ask you to pick your favorite child, but if you had to pick your favorite dessert from the cookbook, which one would it be and why?

Chewy frosted tahini cookies. They're the best dessert texture (chewy) with the best dessert flavor (tahini) and they have the best topping (buttercream).

In addition to your book, your 15th season of Girl Meets Farm premiered on Food Network this spring, congratulations! What can we expect from the newest season of the show? Will we see a lot of the Sweet Farm recipes on air?

My favorite episode, possibly of all time, is in this run, and it's all about our hunt for a minivan. Because I'm at the minivan stage in my life. So, I'm making a meal inspired by a fast-food drive-thru meal and we're judging the minivan that we're testing based on how conducive it is to eating sloppy fast food. There will also be an episode all about Sweet Farm!

We heard that you’ll have an entire episode dedicated to thanking everyone who helped taste and test the recipes for Sweet Farm. Were there any clear favorite recipes from the team?

People really like cookies. I've always been more of a cake person, so I had a hard time wrapping my head around this, but the larder cabinet cookies kept getting really excited reactions. They have halva, pistachios, raspberries, coconut, roses and pita chips! So fun.

We also love the episode featuring Midwestern cookbook club recipes, in particular the hotdish, which apparently has some very specific parameters before you can call it a hotdish. For those of us not familiar, can you please explain what entails a hotdish?

It's a subset of casseroles that is a full meal in a dish: protein, veggie, something saucy to hold it all together, something carby and something cool on top, like tots or crushed crackers. It's everything you want to eat during a cold Midwest winter day.

Last question. After finishing the book, what was the first dessert you made that wasn’t for recipe testing or tasting?

Samah Dada's date "Snickers"!

Where to Watch 'Girl Meets Farm'

Watch Girl Meets Farm Sundays at 11|10c. Catch up on past seasons on Max and discovery+. Follow Molly on her website and on Instagram @mollyyeh.

Molly's responses have been edited for grammar and clarity.