This recipe is inspired by an onigiri I saw when I was traveling in Japan earlier this February. We were staying in Shinjuku, and had about 4 days(including travel) to explore Tokyo. While we were at Tokyo Skytree, there was an onigiri store in the department store, and I saw this onigiri that was triangular…
Author: Freddy
I have some training in both savory and pastry when it comes to food. I love to develop recipes in my spare time, just because the creative side of cooking is what really appeals to me.
Wintermelon Assam Milk Tea Cream Puffs
Wintermelon has become an ingredient I am more and more familiar with as of 2024 – I have used it in mooncakes, milk teas, and now cream puffs! What I love about wintermelon is that it is nostalgic – my mom would make wintermelon tea for us growing up, which was just wintermelon cooked down…
Kakuni(Japanese braised pork)
Kakuni is a Japanese dish consisting of braised cubes of pork belly in this sweet soy-based broth, usually served with a braised egg and mustard. I came to really love this dish over the past year, when I first had it at a Japanese restaurant in Torrance, then again almost a week later when I…
Sourdough Shio Pan
Shio pan(or salt bread) is one of those Japanese pastries that I had a more recent relationship with, but one that I adore greatly. Soft, fluffy, vaguely croissant-shaped bread with a salty flavor, this was a great concept for me to use Horacio, my sourdough starter, in. Unlike with my previous shio pan recipe, this…
Maple Pumpkin Pie
I have had this recipe on my to-bake list since the spring; I have a weird relationship with pumpkin pie where growing up, all of the pumpkin pies I ate tasted like cinnamon-caked cardboard in a pie crust. And it was a shame because on so many of the cartoons I grew watching, pumpkin pie…
Pork Loin with Fennel, Green Apple, and Potato
This is like the most quintessential meat and three veg-type of dish I am putting on my blog. Mostly because it is homey and comforting, but I wanted to plate it in a more elegant and whimsical way. I wanted to do another pork loin dish, but in terms of what I wanted to pair…
Vegan Apple-Tanghulu Doughnuts
These doughnuts came about because I had a bunch of apples I needed to use from apple picking with my friends(fun fact, it’s been a running 5 year tradition that my friends and I drive 2 hours to a city called Oak Glen, and we pick apples there for fun in the fall). Whenever we…
Gyutan (Beef Tongue) Doria
Doria is a Japanese rice gratin, consisting of steamed rice with a white sauce or cheese poured over it and the entire thing is then broiled until golden-brown. I truthfully never had doria until this year, and that is a HUGE shock to me, given that I’ve been to Japan over 5 times, lived there…
Chocolate Olive Oil Cupcakes
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for cupcakes, since I learned how to bake through watching Cupcake Wars way back in the day on the Food Network. Not going to lie, I always dreamed about going on that show, but I guess being on two seasons of Masterchef and ironically still…
Sourdough Garlic Cream Buns
One of the many triumphs in my sourdough experiments were these sourdough garlic cream buns. This recipe was directly inspired by both the everything milk buns that were occasionally sold at EatDomi and the trending bloom bagel. In both cases, it is a round piece of bread that it cut to have wedges on top,…
Chocolate Chip-Ricotta Pancakes
Back during the summer, I had a decently-sized tub of ricotta, which I only used a small portion of for lasagna. And that left me with a large amount of ricotta cheese that I had to stretch across about 4 different recipes. This was one of them. But I chose to post this specific recipe…
Beef Moussaka
This recipe came about because I had a bunch of leftover potatoes, and I happened to purchase some graffiti eggplant the other day. Graffiti eggplant is just an eggplant that has a striped white and purple skin. Besides that, it literally tastes the same, and is just another eggplant, aka perfect to cook in a…
Mexican Hot Chocolate Tiramisu
These tiramisu were made because I got a request to do a coffee-free tiramisu featuring chocolate and cinnamon in some form or capacity. With tiramisu, there are four core components. The sponge, usually ladyfingers or savioardi biscuits, a caffeinated soak that is usually spiked with rum or amoretto, a creamy mascarpone situation, and the cocoa…
Litwick Carrot Cakes
Making these little Litwick carrot cakes was an interesting process. Originally, I was going to bake carrot cake batter in cookie shot molds, and then stuff those with a lot of fun fillings, and decorate the exterior of the cakes to resemble little Litwicks. Litwicks, for those unfamiliar with them, are a Pokemon that is…
Salted Caramel “Black Thunder” Bars
I don’t know how I went as long as I have without ever eating a Black Thunder cookie bar. These popular Japanese candy bars consist of a black cacao cookie with crunchy rice and a chocolate coating. They are texturally addictive, and I can only assume that the name “Black Thunder” refers to both the…
Dubai Chocolate Muffins
I have been toying around with Dubai chocolate-flavored things, because chocolate-pistachio is one of my favorite flavor combinations. The chocolate bar is stuffed with a mixture of pistachio cream and toasted kataifi(shredded phyllo dough), which is a loose homage to knafeh, a Middle Eastern dessert that uses those ingredients. Smoky, salty, crunchy, creamy, bitter, and…
Devil’s Food Cauldron Cakes
This recipe was me creating my take on Cauldron Cakes from the Harry Potter series. I did get the Cauldron Cakes from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, and while it was not terrible by any means, my one gripe was that the cauldron part of the cake was just a silicone…
Marbled Sesame Cheesecake Brulee
So I was scouring the internet, and found this gorgeous rectangular cheesecake with a bruleed top, that was sold by the popular Japanese brand, Mr. Cheesecake. That store features these rectangular slabs of cheesecake with a caramelized top and a custard-like center – think like a more aesthetically pleasing basque cheesecake. What was cool was…
Beef Heart with Lemon-Pecorino Risotto
Beef heart is a very fascinating ingredient. Being a high-activity muscle, heart as an ingredient can eat chewy after being treated with most cooking methods. However, I love preparing it in a marinade, then searing it, almost like how you treat ahi tuna. I actually never touched a beef heart before I made this recipe….
Shiny Cottonee (Hojicha) Tea-ramisu
So I had already made a regular Cottonee tea-ramisu(tiramisu but using tea instead of coffee) before, but I figured, why not invert the matcha and hojicha in the recipe, and somehow we wound up with shiny Cottonee. Unlike normal Cottonee, which features a white body, orange eyes, and green leaves, a shiny Cottonee features a…
Freddy's Harajuku 