Freddy's Harajuku

“Fever Dream”: a plated dessert

I literally named this dessert after my favorite mxmtoon song, “Fever Dream”. For me, that term represents memories and milestones of your life, past, present, and future, just melting together into one moment. So I wanted to do that in this dessert! For starters, I wanted to use cherries, since my birthday cake growing up…

Forêt de cauchemars: a petit gateau

This dessert literally only happened because I purchased a ton of cherries to make another recipe with, and I had to figure out what to do with them before they went moldy. Which is always a great motivator when you purchase way too much of an ingredient! So I went ahead and pureed my remaining…

Amethyst: lavender-honey gemstone cookies

It has been a minute since I made any of my gemstone cookies, so I felt like I needed to bring out a new flavor! I still have a lot of lavender from the last time I used it(yes, that was over a year ago), so I wanted to use some of it in this…

Gluten free pumpkin cake roll

I literally came up with this recipe for my coworker, Holly. It was her last day at work, and she has a gluten allergy, so I wanted to make something that embraced the seasonality of it being fall, but also made 100% without gluten. I have never quite made a gluten-free chiffon cake before, so…

Okra noodles with dashi and shisso

This dish came about because my friend Karen was growing okra in her backyard, and she gifted me with a ton of it when I hung out with her. My initial thoughts on what to do with the okra were either a curry or a gumbo, but then I thought about something lighter and more…

Chocolate-raspberry-rose tarts

I literally only came up with these because I had a coworker who was putting in her two-weeks, and I wanted to thank her properly for all of the hard work she had done! She specifically requested chocolate and raspberry, and I just happened to have made a batch of raspberry-rose jam, so I wanted…

Sakura financier

With cherries being in season, I had to make something fun with them! I had done cherry tarts in the past, but I wanted to change it up a little. While I love the combination of almond and cherry, I wanted to also use the salted cherry blossoms I still had, and that’s when I…

Beetroot red velvet with yuzu cream cheese frosting

So this was actually a cake order for a friend’s boyfriend’s birthday. He wanted a red velvet cake, and I did not want to use red food dye, so I opted for using beetroot powder. My initial batch turned out brown, as beet root powder does not like being baked, and I had to do…

Pumpkin Cream Puffs

This recipe only came about because my friend Naama gave me a squash that was grown by her friend. Squash could refer to a lot of things, but in this case, think like a butternut or kabocha squash, so basically a pumpkin. I figured since the flavor of it was so sweet, it would work…

Ruby chocolate-berry cake

When I was conceptualizing this dessert, I actually had a ton of leftover components and ingredients in my fridge. I had a ruby chocolate-sakura mousse from a plated dessert, leftover pate brisee pie crust from a pie I made, leftover ruby chocolate snow the same aforementioned plated dessert, and a bag of berries that turned…

Savory pumpkin curry puffs

These are my take on pumpkin pasties from the Harry Potter series. I would assume that they are dessert-friendly in real life, but I figured a fun little spin on them would be to go savory! For the pastry, I was inspired by Malaysian styled curry puffs, which are made with this flaky pastry formed…

Yogurt panna cotta with instant ramen “crunch”, yuzu chia seeds, and macerated peaches

So before somebody assumes that I was smoking something, I came up with this dish in response to a friend giving me a “Mystery Box” challenge. She wanted to see what I could do with spicy Korean instant ramen and chia seeds. Hilariously enough, my mind did not want to go in the savory direction,…

Butterscotch and purple yam wool bread

These have been a brainchild of mine for a while – I wanted to make a fluffy, Chinese-style pastry with a baked yam filling since 2018 actually. But I was lazy. The idea of peeling and steaming yam and then mashing it sounded tedious. But then I realized, why not just microwave the yam? It’s…

Injeolmi and barley tea mirror glaze cake

This was a last-minute cake order for my sister’s high school best friend, Jane. Jane is currently expecting, and in commemoration of that, I wanted to make a dessert that was very much to her liking – Jane herself is Korean, and she loves Asian desserts and flavors. So naturally, I went with injeolmi powder,…

Baked lapseng buns

These are the baked version of my childhood favorite lapseng buns that we would get at dim sum when I was a kid. I guess growing up in America, and being more familiar with hotdogs than I was har gow at that point in my life, lapseng buns, being so similar to a hotdog, were…

Carnitas congee with salsa chintextle

I really wanted to dedicate this dish to the rabbit hole that was exploring Oaxacan recipes on the internet over the past year. That and watching chef Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins’s video on Vice about mole. In that video, she mentioned how salsa chintextle, a Oaxacan mother sauce made with pasilla chilies and shrimp, was quite similar…

Tofu ice cream with tofu water meringue

So this would not be the first tofu ice cream recipe I have made. However, it would be the first where I do not use coconut milk – that makes a huge difference in the actual flavor of the ice cream, as coconut milk, while it does contain the necessary fat to create creamy vegan…

Nigredo: a plated dish

This was one of those dishes that I had on my to-make list for months, but I just never got around to it, mostly out of laziness – I wanted to practice doing a Oaxacan style black mole, using black garlic, but I just never got around to buying the chilies for it until more…

Purple yam mooncakes

If I did not post a mooncake recipe this year, I would have felt like a bad Taiwanese American. I did make some last year, but that was more of a test run, using somebody else’s recipe. So this time, I went ahead and did some more tests, and came up with one that is…

Sea Angel: a plated dessert

This was the last dish in my “Namie” pop-up dinner, featuring strawberries and lychees to embrace the summer. I wanted to use both in several different ways, and I also wanted to use pate choux as the base for this dessert, since I just love how choux with craquelin resembles a coral reef. With the…