I feel like the hallmark to a great baker is how they approach the simpler things. For me, whenever I order multiple cupcakes from a bakery, one flavor is always red velvet. The simple reason is because with red velvet, there are a few criteria that need to be met: the cake must be red,…
Category: Cakes
Coconut-chocolate-caramel cake
In a lot of ways, this cake is almost a German chocolate cake, and almond an Almond Joy cake. If I swapped the macadamia nuts with pecans, it’s basically German chocolate. If I omitted the caramel and swapped the macadamia for almonds, we have Almond Joy. This cake features chocolate, coconut, macadamia nuts, and salted…
Blueberry pie doughnut creams
I feel like I haven’t been baking a ton of doughnut creams lately, and I LOVE making doughnut creams…for the most part. They consist of a baked cake, a set mousse, a mirror glaze, and at least one or two cute or unique toppings. The reason I tend not to make them often is because…
Dulcey-piƱa colada cake
So I made this cake for my friend, Carolyn, specifically on her birthday. She was hardcore craving a “toasty, tropically flavored” cake, and she literally gave me a list of what she wanted. She wanted a coconut cake with crunchy macadamia nuts, something with pineapple, but it had to be cooked, toasted coconut, and something…
Rough puff galette de rois
Galette de rois is a French pastry that consists of two circles of puff pastry surrounding an almond/frangipane-type of filling. Usually, there is a bead, bean, or some kind of trinket baked into the cake, and whoever finds it is crowned the king (or queen) for the day! Because of that, this cake is usually…
Cannoli loaf cakes
Whenever I think of cannoli, I am immediately taken back to my time in Boston, where we had one of the most famous cannoli bakeries in Mike’s Pastry. Oh, Mike’s. It was controlled chaos. Crowds and crowds of people, lined up along the street, waiting to get into a cramped store with display cases filled…
New Rules: a plated dessert
For me, this dessert was all about trying a couple of new things. Using gjetost cheese in a fonduta was a new idea, and playing around with more savory things like carrots and pairing that with mugicha, which is a barley tea. I also featured yuzu in this dessert as well, since the sort of…
Keep on keeping on: a roll cake
I have wanted to make a vertical roll cake again for quite a while. They’re a lot of fun because visually, they resemble trees! Whenever I think about Christmas, I obviously have to think of yule logs or bouche de noels. Those are roll cakes that are decorated to look like a freshly cut log….
Persimmon-gjetost-walnut cake roll
I love persimmon season so much. Mostly because the fruit itself can be used in a variety of ways. Persimmon are like the opposite of corn, where fresh corn is sugary and as it sits, those sugars convert to starch and the corn gets less sweet, but more creamy. With persimmon, it starts out starchy…
Sea buckthorn torte
This cake is my homage to sachertorte. For those of you unaware of what that is, sachertorte is a Viennese chocolate cake that has a thin layer of apricot jam inside of it, and it is covered in a beautiful chocolate glaze. It is a highly technical and iconic cake to Austria, to the point…
Ruby chocolate-blood orange “Poosh” cake
So my sister had purchased a “Poosh” cake and I literally had no idea what is was until she did that. Apparently, it is a pink olive oil cake that the Kardashians endorsed, with the proceeds going to the Armenia relief fund, and it is extremely hard to come by. The completely pink cake itself…
Hummingbird naked cake
I love doing takes on hummingbird cake, just because the combination of banana, cream cheese, and pecan is a lot of fun to play around with. Sometimes pineapple and coconut can be added in too, but for this variation, I just wanted to keep it down to those core three flavors. I mentioned. I also…
Gyakkou: a plated dessert
With this dessert, my aim was to create something that was delicate and light, while at the same time, having a pronounced flavor. So I opted for rose and almond for the flavor combination, being inspired by Persian baking, and me wanting to use Turkish delight and almond cake in some way or form. So…
Hot cereal milk cakes with cereal milk ganache and corn cookies
This cake would be my complete homage to milkbar. Corn and cereal milk. That’s literally it. Hot milk cake is a cake that uses warm milk to create a tender crumb and batter. By using cereal milk instead, you then have a hot cereal milk cake, which I find to be an instant one-up. On…
Plum and cream naked cake
So I had about two hours to come up with a cake for a last-minute request, and this is what I came up with. I knew that I wanted to do something simple with cream and cake and some kind of fruit, and it just so happened that, being 1/4 Chinese, I had a ton…
Yaki Imo Basque Cheesecakes
These cheesecakes were the brainchild of me having purchased far too many yams and trying to figure out how to get rid of them. I remember fondly eating yaki imo as a child, which are just yams that are roasted on coals, and then served to you, wrapped up in parchment and piping hot. They…
Coconut Delight Entremet
I actually made this for my sister’s birthday back in August, since I knew that she loves Coconut Delights/Samoas, and this cake made perfect sense for that. My typical format for an entremet is chiffon cake, mousse, maybe a filling in the mousse, and the mirror glaze. For this one, I wanted to semi-change it…
Strawberry Jewel Box Cake
I came up with this recipe for a friend of mine’s birthday. She happened to be a designer, so I knew this cake needed to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible. When it come to preferences, she specified liking lighter cakes with lots of cream and fresh fruit, so I knew I could do something…
Ube, mango, and pandan layer cake
So I actually made this cake as an order for one of my closest friends’ boyfriend’s birthday! She requested it to have ube since he’s Filipino, and he loves the color purple. So I went with an ube cake with a mango-lime pudding layer, as well as a pandan-buko French buttercream, and ube crumble as…
Peach-almond-lavender layer cake
So I actually made this cake as an order for a classmate since elementary school’s older sister! When I asked about her favorite flavors, lavender was among them, and I knew I could play around with that to make a really pretty, summery cake! So I thought about what paired well with it. The obvious…
Freddy's Harajuku 