What is it about hibiscus? 🌺

If you look closely at the Mòso logo, you will find a hibiscus flower.

It is there very intentionally.

Growing up in Haiti, we had this enormous hibiscus hedge surrounding our yard. When I say enormous, I mean it. It grew from the ground to what I remember being maybe seven feet tall, stretching along the side of our home in this beautiful wall of green and red.

And I remember those red flowers.

I remember walking outside and picking them. I remember what they looked like. I even remember their smell.

It is one of those childhood memories that has somehow remained incredibly vivid, even after all these years.

Maybe that is why, when I started imagining what my own bakery could become, I kept coming back to hibiscus.

I wanted to find a way to bake with it.

Actually, I became a little determined to bake with it.

My first real creation for what would eventually become Mòso was going to be something flavored with hibiscus.

I researched. I tested. I changed the glaze. I changed the filling. I worked on the dough. I learned how to shape the buns so they would be beautiful, soft, chewy, and worthy of the flavor I was trying so hard to capture.

Eventually, the Hibiscus Sweet Bun was born.

And I absolutely love her.

Hibiscus has this beautiful tartness, almost reminiscent of cranberry, with something floral and incredibly fragrant underneath it. In a soft sweet bun, it becomes this bright, unexpected little bite that is difficult to describe until you taste it.

But there is another reason this particular bake means so much to me.

That hibiscus hedge from my childhood is gone.

During the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the wall and gate beside it came down. The hedge that lives so vividly in my memories does not exist anymore. I lost a lot that day but nothing so much as

I did not realize until much later how much that mattered to me.

So perhaps these buns are my way of bringing a tiny piece of it back.

The flowers I used to pick as a little girl cannot grow along that wall anymore, but somehow, decades later, thousands of miles away from Haiti, hibiscus is growing again in my kitchen.

Only now, I get to turn it into something I can hand to you.

Maybe that is what Mòso is becoming for me.

Taking pieces of home, pieces of memory, pieces of places and people and flavors that shaped me, and finding a way to make them tangible again.

One mòso at a time. 🌺

So when you taste one of my Hibiscus Sweet Buns, I hope you love it.

But I also hope, just for a moment, you will come down memory lane with me.

Back to a little girl in Haiti, standing beside an enormous green hedge, reaching up to pick a red hibiscus flower. 🌺