In a lot of ways, this cake is an homage to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Specifically, the chocolate bar that Charlie found the golden ticket in, which was a “Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight”. Now, I have never eaten a Wonka bar in my life. I always wanted to, and that actually may be a future project…
Category: Cakes
Mini Cereal Milk Baked Doughnuts
Cereal milk is a Milkbar classic, made by steeping unsweetened cornflakes into milk, and then straining out said cornflakes so that the milk is more flavorful. You can toast the cornflakes before you steep them into the milk as well, which will add to the flavor slightly! However, one thing I always wanted to figure…
Strawberry Christmas Cake
I feel like a lot of countries have their version of a Christmas cake. The Germans have baumkuchen, the French have bouche de noel. In Japan(and by a larger extension, a lot of east Asian countries), Christmas cake takes the form of a vanilla cake with vanilla cream and strawberries. The red and white color…
Acorn Sticky Toffee Puddings
This recipe came up because my friend and talented chef, Kesha Taro, and I were talking about acorn flour. Kesha worked for Gordon Ramsay doing culinary production for decades. She worked briefly on season 10, but I didn’t meet her until season 11 open casting calls, and she was super kind. Flash forward years later,…
Gluten-Free Chocolate Milkbar Birthday Cake
So back when I worked at Milkbar, my least favorite cake to assemble was the chocolate birthday cake. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love eating chocolate cake. However, when it came to assembling this one, it was tricky. At Milkbar, at least for their actual bakery operation, each layer of buttercream needs to be…
Purple Taro Dream Cake
This recipe was actually a cake order for my childhood friend, Lily! More specifically, Lily ordered it for her older sister, Weili, for her birthday. Lily and I technically go all the way back to 4th grade, when she first moved to the states from Taiwan. We weren’t super close though, mostly because back in…
Graham Central Station Roll Cake
Whenever I would go to Handel’s Ice Cream, one of their flavors that I would get was Graham Central Station. Graham cracker ice cream with graham cracker bits and chocolate chunks. So like a reconfigured S’more, without the marshmallow. And trust me when I say this, I love S’mores. Back in high school, one way…
Chocolate-stuffed Yellow Cupcakes with Cookie Butter Frosting
The thing about yellow cake with chocolate frosting is that it is a really nostalgic, Americana type of dessert. I personally don’t eat yellow cake that frequently, but it has been requested a lot from me, and I enjoy the challenge of making it! The thing about yellow cake is that it contains a lot…
London Fog Layer Cake
This was actually a cake order from a couple that I met at my friend Sylvie’s birthday party. They were incredibly sweet and fun to talk to, and we hit it off almost right away. So when I was contacted to make a cake for one of their birthdays, I immediately had to say yes!…
Cereal Milk Compost Birthday Cake
During my time at Milkbar, we would always try to find creative ways to lower our food costs. One major method included reserving our cake scraps for future cake assembly. However, one thing that we could never figure out was how to use up the leftover soggy cereal that we would end up with after…
Chocolate “Birthday” Cake
Originally this was supposed to be a birthday cake order for a client, but they cancelled after I already baked the cake, stacked it up, and was about to decorate it. My client wanted a cake large enough to feed a family of 10-12(which is honestly way beyond the usual portions I serve, since I…
French Vanilla Entremet
I came up with this recipe because I was drinking coffee on day, and added French vanilla creamer to it. And then it dawned on me, what exactly made this creamer French vanilla-flavored as opposed to just vanilla? After looking at several articles online, the general idea was that French vanilla refers to the French…
Pear-Honey-Gingerbread Entremet
One of my favorite things my mom would make for me when I was sick is pears steamed with ginger and honey. The juicy steamed pears would be fork-tender, while being aromatic with both the fragrant honey and the warming slices of ginger. I still remember when I had COVID(not fun times at all), and…
Assam Tea-ramisu
So a while ago, I purchased assam tea to make some desserts with, only for me to receive twice the amount I intended on ordering, and being stuck with more assam tea than I knew that to do with. For those unfamiliar with it, assam is a kind of black tea, popular in countries such…
Stracciatella Layer Cake
Unless you’ve been to a place that sells Italian ice cream, you might be wondering what stracciatella is. In Italian, it translates to “little rags”. And in Lombardy, stracciatella is a kind of gelato, that is creamy vanilla with shards of chocolate running through it. In other regions of Italy, it could refer to a…
Maple-candied Pumpkin and Acorn Cake
This cake was inspired from when I was in Kyoto, admiring all of the autumn nature-themed artwork in several of the local museums there. I wanted to make this yellow-ish cake with pretty reds and oranges, indicative of autumnal colors, and flavors. And since I play Animal Crossing, I am fully aware that maple leaves…
Caramel Apple Naked Cake
This cake was a special request from my dear friend, Justina. She wanted an apple pie-inspired Milkbar naked cake for her birthday, and I just wanted to make sure it was 100% to her liking. She wanted there to be doughy, buttery bits, caramelized chunks of apples, and some sort of creamy component, all of…
Pink Peach-Moscato Pound Cake
So this recipe came about because I had leftover pink peaches from another recipe, and I did not want those to go to waste. Pink peaches are made by taking the peels off of white peaches, turning that into a simple syrup, then cooking the white peaches in said simple syrup. The syrup, through being…
(F)red Velvet-Berry Cheesecake Layer Cake
This red velvet cake recipe came about because I had leftover mixed berry coulis in my fridge and leftover graham crackers from the Graham Central Station cake, and I needed to figure out how to get rid of them. Initially, I wanted to do a ruby chocolate-mixed berry cheesecake, but I also wanted to do…
Assam Tea Buttercream Cake
Growing up in a Taiwanese/Chinese-American household, almost all of our plateware was white and blue porcelain. To this day, I still don’t fully get why it was that color, but the pattern has really grown on me over the years. To the point where I really wanted to make a cake as an homage to…
Freddy's Harajuku 