I love malt balls. They are crunchy, chocolate-covered, and taste of childhood. Sickly sweet to the point where it’s painful. I wanted to take that candy and transform it into a delicious, decadent chocolate cake, so that’s exactly what I did. I made a chocolate cake batter using the malt balls, melted down into ovaltine,…
Ube-Kaya and Pepita-Pumpkin Pie Cookies
I love doing cookies during the fall and winter, mostly because it reminds me of my dear friend Amanda. When we were still in charge of a food publication together during college, she had the cutest and most brilliant idea to do a cookie swap for our holiday event. Seeing a variety of cookies, it…
YUMEKATARI: buckwheat soba with butterfly pea and mushroom broths
I have always wanted to make my own soba noodles, because it looks really cool and I just love being able to make my own pasta or dough from scratch. The trick behind buckwheat flour (besides the fact that I had to go to five different grocery stores to procure it, so thank you Wholefoods…
Heartless: Queen of Hearts inspired mirror glaze cake
I really just came up with this dessert when I was thinking about Tim Burton-inspired cakes. The Queen of Hearts is such an iconic image and has that really dramatic black-red aesthetic that I just knew I could work with. I wanted to do something that really captured that sinister look, so I went with…
Waiting for the rain: a plated concept
The inspiration for this dessert came from Maaya Sakamoto’s song, “Waiting for the Rain”. It was a song I first listened to my senior year when I was going through some serious shit. Maybe not the best thing to listen to, because it was a beautiful, but sad song. The lyrics really stood out to…
Maple-chocolate banana bread
This recipe was inspired and for my friend, and ex-coworker/supervisor, Ms. Sitha Ith. She was one of the few sane people in my department in a sea of crazies, so I immediately warmed up to her because of that. Since it was recently her birthday, and because I knew she loved banana bread, I wanted…
Perfectly blue macarons
So it turns out that the majority of the time I have been making macarons, I have been measuring out my ingredients incorrectly. Whenever it was supposed to be 3/4 cups almond flour and icing sugar, I would do 1 cup. Which definitely would explain why mine would come out so overtly browned, lumpy, dry,…
Yogurt-peach-Turkish delight cake
This dessert came about because we had a fuck-ton of peaches in my fridge that we needed to get rid of. I love yogurt-semolina cake and I knew that it would have the perfect dryness in the crumb to hold up to the moisture in the peaches, so I went that route with baking them…
Semolina knafeh with glazed figs
I really wanted to make knafeh when I saw it in My Kitchen Rules, where Sonya and Hadil, two Jordanian women who were kicked off the show because they got into a fight with another team, prepared it for their instant restaurant. Knafeh is a Middle Eastern cheesecake essentially, soaked with a beautiful rose flavored…
Amoroso pink: raspberry pate choux
The first thing I did when I received my pitaya powder was create these naturally pink cream puffs. I named the dessert Amoroso pink because it means “love pink” in Italian. Super straightforward and simple, because if you want to eat this dessert just based on its appearance, chances are, you love the color pink….
