Hi, I’m um Yen Fang. I’m the u owner of So Yan Dessert. I started in 2019. I grew up um in a family that was always into cooking. We were living in Epherta, Pennsylvania, and in that town there was actually a lot of um the Amish community. And so my dad um met a few friends and they were able to teach him how to make pretzels. And so when my dad opened up the pretzel shop, I was able to go to the pretzel shop and make pretzels. And the way you make bio donuts is similar to how you mix the pretzels. We hand roll each individual doughut. Hand rolling the doughut helps us because we then can press out any air that is in the dough and then also roll it so that it is tight enough to rise and be soft in the inside. We come in at 4:30 a.m. Once the doughuts are hand rolled, it is then put into a proofer for about 1 hour. Once that is done, we then deep fry the um donuts and then we will have to then sugar coat it. My husband and I do a lot of traveling and that was when we discovered uh Japanese cheesecake and so that’s kind of how I kind of started. Japanese cheesecake was an a cake that I um started to bake through word of mouth. It got very popular. Soon enough the bone community heard about it and so I started selling them from my house. My husband and I actually went to Europe and so we discovered the Brios donuts which um I launched in the middle of 2022 and once I did that the demand was just there. We we sold out of donuts every single weekend. My husband finally gave me the crazy idea of leaving corporate world. I was very scared, very nervous. Um it wasn’t something that I again thought I would ever do. Once we opened Soen up, um, our lines were wrapped around the buildings. Living in the corporate world, I was always busy working. I never really had the time to, um, hang out with my siblings or really visit my parents who only lived like 5 minutes away from me. But since opening up the shop, that also gave me a way to spend more time with my siblings who are always here on the weekends to help me as well as my parents. It has not only brought the family closer, but it really shows that life is short. And so when you’re able to spend that with loved ones, that’s all that really matters. I had a really bad anxiety attack and went into depression. It took a toll on myself. Doing donuts and making desserts in general has been an outlet for me, a way for me to um focus and keep my mind off of um the stress and the anxiety that I have. And so I I find it soothing. And so after leaving corporate world, focusing 100% on just making desserts and decorating them has has been something that um is a cure, like a medicine to me. We do rotate our uh flavors every single month. This month we do have our dirt cake, which is a nostalgic flavor for me growing up. My mom used to always make dirt cake for us. Followed by our ube banana pie. I’m a big fan of banana pie. And so ube is actually a southeast um flavor and it is like a taro but tastes more kind of it has a coconuty um accent to it. A lot of my inspiration comes from my travels as well as um my um culture mong. We then have our strawberry filled with our um fresh strawberry puree jam topped with um the jam as well as the strawberry. And last our pineapple dream. Again, growing up, we I had um pineapples and I loved pina colada. What I like about making different types of flavors for um each month is that I can live vicariously through the donuts. It portrays how I can live life in any way that I want. Life is like a donut. You can be anything you want to be. Um whether you want to be strawberry or ube banana, you can uh live life the way you want to live and be happy.
Dining and Cooking