Freddy's Harajuku

Blood orange upside down cake

I have made this recipe before, but I think it was on TikTok, back when I actually had/used that app. This cake consists of a layer of caramel-laden blood orange slices that are sitting on top of a dense but delicious olive oil cake. It’s fairly straightforward in flavor profile, and pretty fun to make,…

Ricotta gnocchi with squash, fennel, and salsa verde

So this dish was actually inspired from when I was watching The Chef’s Line on Netflix. For those unfamiliar with the program, it’s a cooking competition show that was originally in Australia, before it premiered on Netflix as well. Sadly the show is no longer running, but there were a lot of cool recipes and…

Mini milk bread toasts with homemade bread and jams

I just randomly had an epiphany the other day to make mini brick toasts with ricotta and jam. Mostly because I was missing the brick toasts from Sqirl(yes I know that’s controversial to be a fan of that restaurant with all of the moldy jam and recipe-stealing scandals, but you can’t deny that the food…

Double decker buttermilk Fraisier cake

I do love myself a good fraisier cake, or a fraisier dessert of any kind, honestly! For those unfamiliar with the term, a fraisier cake is just a strawberry cake, usually featuring two layers of vanilla sponge with strawberries surrounding it and a vanilla cream between the layers. I have made a couple in the…

Rainbow dango(suama)

So I was brainstorming different rainbow desserts for Pride this year, and I literally came up with the idea to do these when I was walking through my local Japanese grocery store(which I frequent a lot these days), and stumbled upon Fugetsu-Do‘s rainbow dango, also called suama. For those unfamiliar, Fugetsu-Do is a highly popular…

Passionfruit chouquettes with passionfruit spun sugar

I made these chouquettes with a friend of mine, Sylvie, as a thank you for sowing up a couple of holes I had in one of my sleeveless hoodies, and one of my pairs of work pants. Sylvie loves passionfruit, and in exchange for agreeing to sow up my clothes like the talented seamstress that…

Beef cappelletti with brodo and fennel

I really only came up with this dish because I had a lot of oxtail and oxtail broth leftover, and wanted to use it in something. So I came up with this idea to make a stuffed pasta with the leftover oxtail meat, and serve it in the broth to finish. But that just felt…

Meyer lemon basque cheesecake with Meyer lemon cream

Basque cheesecake will forever be that quintessential ugly delicious dessert for me. Well, that and worms and dirt. You can’t make worms and dirt look pretty, and that’s perfectly fine with me. With this particular basque cheesecake, I had a ton of Meyer lemons lying around, to the point where you’d think that they just…

Congee with mini youtiao

I love congee. To the point where I’ve posted about it at least a couple of times now. What makes this congee a little different than the other ones I have made it is that it’s a lot simpler. The other ones used game birds or meats, or were a little less accessible. But this…

Mixed berry chiffon cake

This cake was inspired from my favorite Paris Baguette item, which literally is named the same thing. Back in college, I was obsessed with the mixed berry chiffon cakes that they had, and it would be my go to order there all the time. Fluffy cake with cream and fresh berries, it was always a…

Gluten-free coconut-lime cheesecakes

I have been craving Magnolia Bakery’s lime and coconut cheesecake since I had it years ago when I visited New York. While one can make the argument that I could just drive to Downtown L.A. to get it, I’m lazy. Lazy enough to try making my own version of it, anyways. So for the cake,…

Kirimochi waffles

This is literally the simplest recipe I have ever posted on this blog. Mostly because it was something I thought of randomly when I was watching videos of Japanese chefs making yakimochi. Yakimochi is a grilled mochi, made by slowly charring kirimochi. Now, kirimochi is a mochi that is slowly dried out until it is…

Tea-smoked duck with green apple and onion

I came up with this dish because I was thinking about what the prettiest duck dish I could make, and this is what I thought up of. I love to tea smoke proteins, and I love tea smoked duck. Smoking the duck in chamomile tea specifically gives it a pleasant earthiness, and I wanted to…

Mango lassi mille feuille

So with this dessert, I wanted to combine Indian flavors with Albanian and French techniques. For the pastry, I went with a homemade phyllo, brushed with ghee just to guarantee that beautiful browning on the dough. With the filling, I did a yogurt and cardamom namelaka, which is a ganache that is whipped. For this…

Fried “cauli”-mari with tofu aioli

I literally only came up with this because of a conversation I had with a friend, Christy. She was making salt and pepper cauliflower, and I realized that cauliflower stems could be cut to resemble calamari! Hence the name, “cauli”-mari. But stems on their own don’t taste that good, so I opted to marinate the…

Roasted cornish hen with umami rice cabbage roll

I really came up with this dish because I wanted to do a cornish hen dish for a while, but was not fully sure where to go with it, initially. I wanted to do something a little European, but obviously a little Asian as well, and that’s how I came to the dish I came…

Incan gold cookies

I don’t even know why I didn’t think about making these cookies the first time I ever used lucuma. It just makes so much sense, especially since corn is such a huge part of Peruvian cuisine, and lucuma, being a fruit that tastes exactly like caramel, would compliment that so perfectly! For these cookies, I…

Strawberry tiramisu

So I have made many a strawberry tiramisu in the past. Ever since I was a student in college, I just loved the idea of making tiramisu that were not traditionally flavored. Ever since I moved back to Los Angeles, I fell in love with the aesthetic of the tiramisu at Cafe Bora in Koreatown,…

Milk bread gua bao

So I had been reading the Mr. Jiu’s cookbook recently, and something that inspired me was seeing them take milk bread dough and turning that into buns. I have done something like that before with my “Fred bread”, but seeing it done by a restaurant that I really look up to just validates my decisions…

Banana’s Foster Souffle Pancakes

I really wanted to make souffle pancakes again for quite some time, so that’s where this recipe really came about from. I just love how soft and fluffy these pancakes are, since they use a heavily whipped egg white just to get them to that light and airy consistency. The Banana’s Foster adds a playful…