Freddy's Harajuku|フレディの原宿

Citrine: lemon-poppyseed cookies with elderflower-lemon crystals

Continuing on with my crystal cookies, I wanted to do a lemon-poppyseed cookie, a flavor combination I love, and I also wanted to do lemon crystals, which will be similarly made to Turkish delight. Since Turkish delight does traditionally use a flower to flavor it, being rose, I wanted to use elderflower instead, and use…

Pear tarte tatin with milk tea crème anglaise

As somebody who has suffered prior trauma from tarte tatin, I can tell you now that I’ve made at least ten of them this year alone. To celebrate the fall, and to use the free bosc pears that were lying around at work, I wanted to make yet another tarte tatin. This time, I decided…

Drift away: a plated dessert

When I was thinking of desserts to make, I was really inspired by a particular song from the Steven Universe movie called “Drift Away”. It was about a jester who was essentially abandoned by her queen and left to be forgotten for millenniums. I thought about the idea of drifting, and wanted to interpret it…

Rose quartz: chocolate-Turkish delight cookies

Chocolate-Turkish delight ice cream is one of my absolute favorites. That and I love to make Turkish delight. I don’t know why. There’s something about how pretty they look that really appeals to me. That gem-like aesthetic. But since I know for a fact that this flavor combination works, I decided to take it from…

Charlotte the fool: a layer cake

For this cake, I just really wanted to come up with a concept that fused multiple desserts into one. That included the charlotte cake, being a layer cake surrounded with ladyfingers, and fool, which is a cream that has puree folded through it, and I also technically made an icebox cake as well, since that…

Plated pineapple upside down cake

This entire dessert stemmed from me making togarashi-honey “dole whip”, and needing to create an entire plate around that ice cream. Since I have leftover pineapple, it just made sense to make something with it, and I opted for a pineapple upside down cake, and to make it almost like a pina colada, I went…

Nexus: a ruby chocolate entremet

I was originally going to do a rose, ruby chocolate, and pistachio tiramisu when I was conceptualizing this dessert, but then I thought about the presentation, and how I really didn’t want it to look too similar to my dreaming of springtime dessert. So instead, I opted for an entremet instead. The flavor combination of…

All for one: a plated dish

Whenever I have a whole duck, I love to go to town. Being a butcher, it’s a ton of fun to work with the whole animal. In this case, I wanted to do duck three ways. The first was braising and roasting the leg. The second was a seared duck breast. The third, it was…

Game bird congee with Chinese krueller (youtiao)

I really came up with this concept out of a necessity of not wanting to waste produce. I happened to purchase a lot of different game birds, ranging from quails to Cornish hens to duck, and I also made stocks out of each and every one of those birds, and reserved the carcass meats as…

Let’s go in the garden: a plated dish

For this dish, I really wanted to prepare something that conjured up nostalgic childhood memories. With lamb, it was something I grew up eating a lot of, because my parents loved it. With the garnish, I knew I wanted to do something that resembled vegetables sprouting out from the earth, and so I went with…

“Chicken and dumplings” wontons

I wanted to create a play on chicken and dumplings, but using wonton soup as the inspiration. Mostly because I had half of a leftover chicken that I needed to get rid of, so I figured, why not just grind up the wing and leg meat and turn that into a dumpling filling? I also…

LAUSD Crumb Cake Doughnut Creams

These came about because I wanted to make something for my new coworker, Georgina. She was talking a lot about this coffee cake she had going to school in the LA Unified School District and I legitimately had no clue what she as talking about. So I looked it up and it was like a…

Curious little penguins: a haupia pie

I really was inspired by all of the cute baby penguin videos I’ve been seeing on Instagram lately, and I just felt like they were a perfect inspiration for a cute dessert. I knew that using butterfly pea tea would work to effect the color of the ocean, while I could use kohakutou(Japanese rock candy)…

“Light as air” layer cake

This dessert was actually for a family friend, Isabel, to celebrate her birthday. Isabel is my father’s friend’s daughter, and she’s a real down to earth person. When I was asking her what kinds of flavors she liked, she told me delicate and light, so I wanted to go with lemon, white chocolate, coconut, and…

Kabocha flan with kabocha friands

This dessert has been on my to-do list since the summer. I am obsessed with flan, it being the first dessert I ever learned how to make, and I’ve been meaning to do something with kabocha squash, but I wanted to wait until it was the fall to do so. For this dessert, it’s a…

Passionfruit cheesecake shumai

These dumplings came about from my excess of passionfruit(what a problem to have, clearly) as well as me wanting to try making a steamed cheesecake dumpling. So I figured, why not mix the passionfruit into the cheesecake and make something truly original? To be a little more fun, I decided to dye the shumai shells…

S’mores potstickers

These literally came about because I wanted to do an innovative dumpling and I was craving s’mores. So I went with a graham cracker flavored wrapper, a chocolate truffle and marshmallow filling, and a cayenne chocolate dipping sauce to balance any overt sweetness in the dessert. What I love about this dessert is that we’re…

All I want: Neapolitan checkerboard cake

I really only made this dessert because I had quite a bit of leftover strawberry Swiss meringue buttercream leftover from a cake I made for a fan, so I racked my brains around what I could possibly do with it. Since I didn’t want to make the same strawberry cake for myself, I opted for…

Milky way: a plated dessert

This concept came about from when I was watching a singing anime on Netflix, called “Carole & Tuesday”. Some of the sounds really stuck out to me as good inspirations or launching points for dishes, including one called “Milky Way”. For obvious reasons, I had to include milk in this dessert as a pivotal focus….

dreaming of springtime: an icebox cake

Icebox cakes are fun to make, mostly because they’re just giant cookies with fun fillings sandwiched between each layer. In this particular rendition, I wanted to use ruby chocolate, since I have a whole bag of it and I never really use it. I wanted the dessert to be pink, since Pinktober is coming up,…