Fashion writer, publicist and Laguna Beach native Dagmarette Yen may not look much like Anne Hathaway, but she sure can relate to Andy Sachs, the character whom the actress portrays in the film The Devil Wears Prada.

Yen, 23, has firsthand experience working Paris Fashion Week. She got to wear the amazing clothes and experience the glamour. But she was also a harried assistant running at all hours to find her boss guava juice. We assume the boss wasn't named Miranda Priestly.

That was back when Yen still had high aspirations for a career in the fashion world. She attended school in London at Hult University, interned for British Vogue and for Mandi Lennard Publicity, a fashion P.R. firm, taking photographs and doing arrangements for fashion shoots.

But all that came to a standstill in spring 2010, when, after several internships following her 2008 graduation, she found herself unable to get a job in the fashion industry.

"I was hitting a wall," says Yen. "I was reconsidering my life and my choice in fashion."

So she revisited a book project that she had started in the winter of 2005 while spending time with her family. It fed into her other dream of becoming a cookbook writer and cooking personality on television. Now she's accomplished one of those goals, having self-published the cookbook Glaedelig Jul—"Merry Christmas," in Danish—which features stories and photos of food, family and baking. And, of course, delicious-looking recipes that can be enjoyed year-round, not just during the holidays.

Yen wrote some of the book while working with children abroad in South Africa in the fall of 2006. She volunteered with the children by day,  teaching them art as part of her fine-arts degree. At night, she would go home and write.

"This book is about family and tradition," says Yen. "Being so far away from my family, it helped me to connect and just think. I'd love to do a travel cookbook, but a Danish Christmas cookbook is a great way to start."

Yen is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant father, Bing Yen, and a Danish immigrant mother, Ann Yen, who both moved to the United States in the 1950s. She looks the part of a former fashion industry publicist in her electric blue silk top, multi-tiered necklace, caramel-colored highlighted hair and black skinny jeans.

She started her cookbook to preserve the tradition of her mother's Danish Christmas meals by just taking photos of the cooking.

"Every year we'd have this amazing Danish Christmas," Yen says. "She had recipes everywhere written on little scraps of paper. We said 'we need to organize this.' It was all in grams and kilos so that so my mom and I converted all of the measurements, and I put it together in this book."

Yen said they stuck to the recipes of her ancestors as closely as possible. One of the recipes, for a pecan pie, was her mother's own creation.

In addition to Yen’s cookbook, she recently launched a maternity clothing line, called Damo Mamo, with her mother. It started when her pregnant sisters asked her to design something for them, since they weren’t fond of the maternity clothes they were finding elsewhere. First she made shirts, which were a hit with her sisters. Then she expanded to the baby shower circuit.

“It became more full-scale when a showroom in New York contacted us and wanted to start selling our clothing to bigger players and bigger department stores,” Yen says. “I told my mom that if we’re doing a clothing company, then I really want it to be clean, organic and simple. It was really important for us to have great fabric, so all of our fabrics are cotton and bamboo. We try to keep the price points as low as possible for organic clothes.”

Producing organic, environmentally-friendly maternity clothing was important to Yen for the sake of both mother and baby. Yen wanted her products to be free of harsh dyes and chemicals.

As for the designs, these are maternity clothes that even non-pregnant women can wear, says Yen.

The future of Damo Mamo is to take the line in more of a general womenswear direction, Yen says. She also wants to expand the line to South Africa, where she and her mother both lived for a time.

“We want to reach out and work with [South Africa] because they have amazing patterns and fabric," says Yen. "We support people who are struggling in the third world. We’d hope to have them do everything from the design to the manufacturing, and we don’t just want to make our stuff for cheaper, we want to pay them fairly, give them work and give them a say in design."

Finally, Yen has a new website that just launched, which includes a blog and videos on cooking, fashion, and her other interests. Click it up at thefinishing-school.com.