I personally love the combination of strawberry and pistachio. Strawberries are tart, sweet, and are just such a beautiful red color. Pistachios can be crunchy, creamy, smoky, and salty. The two really balance each other nicely, especially when sugar enhances both ingredients separately. Strawberries with sugar is such a simple combination, but the sugar really…
Month: March 2023
Kinako Mochi Chiffon Sandwiches
Kinako is one of my favorite ingredients, I feel like it is highly underrated. Translating to “gold powder”, kinako is a Japanese toasted soy bean powder. It is very nutty, similar in flavor to Korean injeolmi or even just peanut butter, and it quite frequently used in Japanese desserts. For me, I grew up eating…
Yellow Chiffon Layer Cake with Blonde Chocolate
Truthfully, I never really understood yellow cake. I just assumed it was a vanilla cake with a lot of yellow food coloring in it. But turns out, yellow cake is not yellow from food coloring, but from the usage of butter in place of oil, and egg yolks. An abundance of egg yolks results in…
Molten Nutella Chip Cookies
While I was practicing intermittent fasting/crash dieting prior to my Hawaii trip, I was craving a lot of different things, which was both good in that I was able to really drill down on the foods I was craving to eat, and bad because I was craving food that actually tasted good, and was not…
Matzoh Crack Rusks
This recipe was the biproduct of me making Japanese-style sando’s and cutting the crusts off the homemade milk bread I used to assemble those with. After making all of my sando’s, I literally had a fish tub-sized container of bread crusts leftover. It felt like a shame to just throw the crusts away after all…
Tokyo Banana Chiffon Sandwiches
Tokyo Banana will always take me back to trips to Japan, where I would eat the soft fluffy snack cakes, stuffed with a banana cream often. When I was conceptualizing a fun chiffon cake sandwich recipe, one of my immediate go-to’s was none other than Tokyo Banana. When it comes to banana-flavored desserts, I learned…
Matcha Cream Chiffon Sandwiches
Perfect in time for St. Patrick’s Day, my next chiffon sandwich recipe is for matcha green tea-flavored! I feel like everyone has at least had matcha in the form of green tea ice cream before, and what I love about pairing matcha with dessert is that sugar and dairy are great vehicles to balance out…
Thin Mint Lunchbox Cake
So in the rare instances where Bri and I get to hang out, cooking is always one of the things we do together. We wanted to bake a cake together, and it just made sense to do mini lunchbox cakes, since then we could have more cakes that way. One particular trend I have been…
Boozy Grasshopper Pie
This dessert was a bit of an unintentional classic for me. I made my first grasshopper pie back in 2016, when I was asked to help cook for a Thanksgiving banquet at Boston University for about 90 people. I was in charge of the desserts, and grasshopper pie was one of the desserts that I…
Caviar Egg Tarts
Somewhat inspired by my trip to Oahu, where we ate at a restaurant called Senia. One of the dishes we were served were these egg tarts, which were savory, filled with an egg salad mixture, and topped with caviar. Now eggs and caviar are a classic combination. Eggs are custardy and rich, and caviar adds…
Matcha Namelaka Mille Feuille
Whenever I think of mille feuille, I actually think of my friend from college, Sena. We took some boring math general-education class together, and one day while we were bored, we were talking about our favorite desserts, mine being financier, and hers being mille feuille. A mille feuille, translated from French to mean “a million…
Matcha Kokedama(Moss Balls)
Kokedama are these decorative moss ball plants that are super popular in Japan. They are used as planters for other plants more often than not, and they give any room a pleasant, earthy aesthetic that I just adore. My first time seeing a kokedama was when I was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, where they…
Chocolate Silk Pie
Now a lot of people might have fond memories of Southern chocolate silk pie. For me, it’s another way to consume more chocolate. That’s really it. I might have had it growing up and going to Marie Calendar’s, but honestly all I can remember from Marie Calendar’s was getting the Banana Meringue Pie, which was…
Matcha-Red Bean Financiers
Whenever I bake a financier, I like to make a joke that I am financier(which I am, as a person who technically works in a financial role/has had prior finance/accounting experience) making a financier. Unless you’re super familiar with French cuisine, you might not even know what a financier is! And no worries, you’re not…
Freddy's Harajuku 