More times than not, when I was making a tofu or yogurt-based mousse cake, I found that after it thaws, the cheesecake has a soggy crust that is sitting in a massive puddle of water. Trust me, I learned this lesson the hard way not once, not twice, but three times. At first, I thought…
Category: Cakes
Thai Tea-Coconut Carrot Cake
This recipe came about because I had a bunch of carrots I needed to get rid of. A while ago, my friends and I visited a farm in Irvine, with the intention of going strawberry picking. But because of all the torrential rain Southern California has been experiencing, the strawberry crops were dead, and we…
Ube-Passionfruit Mousse Cake
I had the initial inspiration for this cake when I was visiting my friend, Ann, who lives in Oahu. There was a shrub with these gorgeous purple flowers, and I had the idea to make a cake with that kind of visual inspiration. In light of everything going on in Maui, I felt like it…
Vegan Spumoni Ice Cream Sandwiches
I am unashamed to admit that the recipe you are about to read was the result of me needing to clean out my refrigerator of several leftover components. I purchased way too many fresh cherries, I had half a block of unpureed bright green edamame tofu that I needed to use up, some chocolate ganache…
Gooey Lemon Curd-Olive Oil Cakes 2.0
So a while ago, I made a gooey olive oil cake with lemon curd, but I wanted to do another rendition of that recipe. While this version is also 100% vegan, I wanted to try a couple of different things. The first is instead of piping the lemon curd into each cake before baking it,…
Tonka Bean Black Forest Cake
Black forest cake was my birthday cake growing up for the first 13 years of my life. Not because I particularly liked it, but because we would always go back to Taiwan for my birthday/winter break, and celebrate it at my grandma’s apartment in Taipei. And the only cake that the bakery underneath her apartment…
Blue Chiffon Cake with Tofu Rare Cheese and Blackberries
This recipe was one of several parts of a blue and white-themed dessert tea tower I have been meaning to make. I had purchased a cute blue and white tea tower from the Pokemon Center in Japan, and it inspired me to make high tea-friendly desserts. However, I wanted to embrace the color of the…
Lemon-Basil Mousse Cake
This recipe was made specifically for my dad. One of my dad’s favorite cakes of mine is a lemon cake. A while ago, I was in the middle of making a lemon-blueberry roll cake, and he wound up eating the cake before I even had time to finish decorating or photographing it. It did cause…
Lemon-Elderflower Cake
With this mousse cake recipe, I was really aiming for something light, using flavors that I knew meshed well together. Lemon and elderflower is a combination I have grown quite fond of, just because you have the tart sharpness of the lemon against the floral, sweetness of the elderflower. The two play off of each…
“Love is Love” Mousse Cake
I was honestly not 100% sure what I was going to make for Pride this year. A huge deterrent for me in regards to making rainbow desserts is having to divide and portion something by 7, and then dying each piece one of the colors of the rainbow. Even with this recipe, which normally I…
Pink Peaches and Cream Cake
This cake was my original intended gift for my mom on Mother’s Day, before I found out that white peaches weren’t in season in May. For this recipe, I went with white peaches for a filling, as a reference to my childhood. Growing up, we had white peach trees in our backyard, and every summer,…
Goat Milk and Lime Basque Cheesecake
I have previously made a larger basque cheesecake recipe using Meyer lemon, and tried to split it in half. While it was not bad by any means, I felt like the cheesecakes were very flat, and needed to be baked into a singular cheesecake to have the appropriate height to width ratio. Funnily enough, when…
Tayde’s Cake
This recipe is in dedication for Tayde, who was a former patient at St. Jude’s Children Hospital, a childhood cancer(acute lymphoblastic leukemia) survivor, and now a healthy mother of two. Her floral-themed art pieces were featured at the Creator’s Summit at St. Jude, which I was lucky enough to attend(thank you, Shari from my first…
The Bamboo Cutter: a petit gateau
This was inspired by the Japanese story called “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”. The story itself featured a bamboo cutter who uncovered a little girl, named Kaguya, one day when he was cutting open stalks of bamboo. She was specifically found inside of a glowing bamboo stalk. As the story progresses, Kaguya is revealed…
Elderflower Piñka Colada Cake
This recipe was originally going to be a ginger-white peach cake, but I couldn’t find white peaches, so I had to make substitutions. The peaches weren’t available, but the grocery store did have pink pineapple, so I made an impulse buy, and grabbed the pink pineapple instead. I’m personally surprised that pink pineapples were more…
Sesame-Kinako-Chocolate: a Petit Gateau
This recipe came about because I was craving something kinako-flavored. Kinako is a toasted soybean flour, which is 100% gluten-free! It kind of tastes like peanut butter, in that it is nutty and warming. I personally love using it with flavors like sesame, which is where the inspiration to pair the two came into play…
The Choco-Bear Cake
This cake was for a baby shower, where the invite featured a cute little teddy bear with light blue balloons. I wanted to pay homage to that image, and carry it through, along with the color scheme of the party in general, in the form of this cake. The clients requested the cake to be…
Rose Quartz Cake Pops
What when I was doing R&D at Milkbar, I fell in love with embedding desserts with Turkish delight to give them a gemstone aesthetic. So these cake pops were a slight homage to that(and also they were for a baby shower, so I wanted to go with something more pastel-pink to reflect that). For those…
Cold Brew-Butter Mochi Crumb Cakes
This recipe came about because my extremely talented friend, Ahran, launched her own product, being vanilla-flavored cold brew concentrate, with Coba coffee, and she was generous enough to gift me some of it! I actually enjoyed the product quite a bit, because you have the sweet fragrance of vanilla against the bitter richness of the…
Pink Lemon-Olive Oil-Rose Cake
This cake is dedicated to my friend, Na’ama, specifically for her birthday. Fun facts, she was one of my friends that attended my apron battle for season 12(she was in the podium instead of the balcony), and we went to college together, but did not actually know each other back then. Since Boston University was…
Freddy's Harajuku 