If you thought this recipe was going to be premade bread, premade mascarpone cheese, and fresh strawberries, you would be only 1/3 right there. I was inspired to do this from my trip to Japan(which honestly inspired a LOT of new recipes for me). I got some strawberry sando’s from Tokyo Station on my Shinkansen…
Category: Recipes
Edamame-Garlic Confit Gazpacho with Socca, Sumac, and Nasturtiums
So as a part of my post-Asia diet, I swore off of foods with added sugars in them. Which is a lot of things, considering the fact that I primarily am a pastry person. In an attempt to eat better, I wanted to make something that was sugar-free, vegan, gluten-free, and still high in protein….
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…
Buko Pandan Madeleines
This recipe is me revisiting the gluten-free coconut madeleines I made a few years ago. A while back, my friends, Ann and Brenda, and I went to a Filipino restaurant in North Hollywood, where we had buko pandan. Buko pandan is a Filipino dessert consisting of sweet coconut milk, young coconut flesh, pandan, puffed rice,…
Butter Bear Pancakes with Kuromitsu
I was inspired to make these pancakes because of an Instagram post(and because I had to use up some eggs and some roasted white chocolate-sesame crunch before I left for my trip to Taiwan/Japan). The idea of these large, fluffy whole-pan pancakes, similar to the ones you can make in a rice cooker, just sounded…
Baked Tofu “Kitten” Doughnuts
This recipe came from two different inspirations. The first is the kawaii doughnuts you’d see in Japan – very popular in Harajuku, kawaii character doughnuts are shaped to resemble cute animals like frogs, rabbits, and in this particular case, kittens! I have been meaning to make a version of these, especially because they are all…
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…
Tea-smoked Miso Cod
This is a recipe that I have been wanting to do since before we filmed Masterchef season 12 in 2021. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to purchase a whole cod, filet it, and set up the tea smoker all in one go, mostly because of laziness, so that’s why it took forever to get…
“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,…
Yakult and Muscat Panna Cotta
Muscat grapes remind me of my first time in Japan, when I was served green muscat grape jelly. In Japanese, muscat is pronounced “masukaato”, and since I was only 16 at the time, I was not sure if that meant musket, as in the gun, since I was still too young to know what moscato…
Lucuma Alfajores Stack
So the initial idea for this recipe came about because I had purchased lucuma pulp for the first time, and I was trying to figure out the best way to utilize it. Lucuma is a fruit that allegedly tastes like caramel, and is the number 1 most popular ice cream flavor in Peru. Personally, after…
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…
Sweetbreads(mollejas) with mole
This dish is a play on one of my favorite dishes, which is mochiko chicken with a Mexican mole. In this case, I wanted to challenge myself here, by using sweetbreads. For those unfamiliar with them, a sweetbread is a kind of offal, or organ meat. Specifically, it is the thymus gland or pancreas from…
Scallion-Sausage Roll Epis
I’m sure for a lot of you, your first question when reading this recipe post would be “what’s an epis?”. An epi, epis being the plural form, is a kind of bread loaf that where the dough is initially shaped like a baguette, but is then snipped and fanned out to sort of look like…
Kinako-PB&J Brioches
These brioches came about because I wanted to make something with the peanut butter and strawberries I had lying around, and the first obvious choice was to do a PB&J. Peanut butter and jelly is such a nostalgic concept, since so many people(at least in the States) have grown up eating these at some point…
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…
Pate Choux Taiyaki “Beignets”
I recently purchased a taiyaki pan and was trying to figure out what other things I could make with it besides, well taiyaki. So I started thinking about what doughs or batters can I cook in a pan, and my mind went to pate choux, or cream puff batter/dough. Choux is made by twice cooking…
Strawberry Goat Milk with Matcha Foam
This recipe was inspired by the cute Japanese strawberry milk drinks, which feature fresh strawberries and milk. Visually satisfying in its simplicity. However, I wanted to do a few things to take that simple idea of fresh strawberry milk, and make it a little more fun. The first thing I did differently was instead of…
Freddy's Harajuku 