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…
Category: Cakes
Anything that can be classified as a cake, from layer cakes to cupcakes to plated desserts.
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…
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…
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…
Chocolate-Orange Cream Chiffon Sandwiches
Continuing on with our weekly chiffon cake sandwiches, our next once is the chocolate-orange. I personally adore the chocolate chiffon cake that we use for this recipe, since it is soft and spongy, but also full of cocoa flavor. I highly recommend using black cacao powder for this recipe, because it adds a fruitiness to…
Sticky Miso Toffee Pudding with Cardamom Ice Cream
Sticky toffee or sticky date pudding is one of those desserts I grew to appreciate during my time in Boston. I once ordered this gingerbread sticky toffee pudding with brown butter, apples, and sage, and it was absolutely delicious! The combination of super soft, fluffy, brown sugary cake drowned in a rich butterscotch sauce was…
Raspberry Tea-ramisu Chiffon Sandwiches
Tiramisu is classically made with either ladyfingers or Savoiardi biscuits, soaked with coffee, layered with mascarpone cheese, and dusted with cocoa powder. It is such a classic Italian dessert, but I wanted to turn it on its head, and do a raspberry tea-ramisu. The logic here was two-fold: raspberries and coffee do not really go…
Strawberry Shortcake Chiffon Sandwiches
I can’t tell if I am late to the whole chiffon cake sandwich craze or not, but I can tell you that I am pretty obsessed with the concept! Aa chiffon cake is traditionally baked in a round cake pan with a little chimney running through it – the chimney allows for even air and…
Tofu Fraisier Rare Cheesecake
I have made rare cheesecake with tofu in the past, and fraisier cake in the past, so I figured, why not combine the two? The end result was quite straightforward, being a rare tofu cheesecake that was rippled with strawberry coulis, enrobed with slices of strawberries, and all on top of a crunchy-salty-sweet Triscuit crust….
Ruby Forest Petit Gateau
This is an homage to the black forest cake, which was my birthday cake for the first 14 years of my life. The reason why we would eat black forest cake was because we would celebrate my birthday in Taiwan, and the bakery in the Shida district where we would stay/live only made one kind…
Chocolate-Cajeta Cupcakes
These cupcakes are meant to represent decadence and indulgence. One of my personal favorite combinations is dark chocolate with salted caramel, and these cupcakes take that combination, and really drive it home. In place of using just a regular caramel, I went with Cajeta. Cajeta is a Oaxacan goat milk caramel, very similar to dulce…
Chinese Bakery Strawberry Cake
My friend Ann would tell me time and time again about her favorite cake being a Chinese Bakery Strawberry Cake. Personally, I grew up on Taiwanese Bakery Black Forest Cake, but that’s an entire recipe for another time! I wanted to try my hand at a super soft and light spongecake with whipped cream and…
Persimmon Tea Cakes
I am fortunate in that a ton of my family friends own persimmon trees. While it is delightful to eat fresh persimmon in peak season at first, admittedly, when you are gifted with 5 pounds of it, you start getting… fatigued by the taste. These little tea cakes were my answer to needing a new…
Ube-Passionfruit-Coconut Cake
This recipe came about because I had ube paste, coconut milk, and fresh passionfruit, all of which I wanted to use, and preferably together. Ube(pronounced oo-beh) is a Filipino purple yam that is sweet and nutty in flavor. Almost like if you took a purple yam and toasted it with brown butter. Ube is a…
Whipped Cheesecake with Brown Butter Carrot Cake: a plated dessert
This recipe came about because I was thinking what I could make with rainbow carrots, and I thought about a fun plated carrot cake meets a cheese platter. Whipped cheesecakes are always a favorite dessert of mine, because they are super easy to do. Cream cheese, gelatin, sugar, and there you have a silky textured…
Swablu Hummingbird Sundae
Back in 2002 when I played Pokemon Sapphire, a much younger Fred adored a Pokemon called Swablu. Swablu is a blue bird-like Pokemon with white, cloud-like wings. It is classified as the Cotton Bird Pokemon, and evolves into Altaria, which honestly looks like a bigger blue bird with cloud-wings, but is somehow a Dragon-type Pokemon….
Blonde Chocolate Crumb Cake Doughnuts
I would be lying if I said this recipe was not just a crumb or coffee cake baked with a hole in it. That’s literally the recipe. However, there is something doubly nostalgic about a crumb cake that also looks like a doughnut, since those are the two coffee shop staple desserts you would usually…
Fidough Box Cake
I have made many cakes in sake cups before. I just love the minimalistic aesthetic of a small wooden cake and when you scoop into it, there’s cake! The concept of this recipe is definitely inspired by the tiramisu from Cafe Bora, but since there is no coffee/tea or alcohol being used, it felt wrong…
Uber Fluffy Chocolate Layer Cake
This chocolate cake is the intersection of everything I could possibly want from a chocolate cake. The sponge is somehow both fudgy and rich, but light and springy with this almost honeycomb-like crumb structure that could only be achieved by whipping the living hell out of egg whites, and adding in just the right amount…
Freddy's Harajuku 