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…
Category: Recipes
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…
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…
Tofu Ice Cream
It took forever to perfect my tofu ice cream recipe. Back in college, when I was learning how to make ice cream from scratch, I thought tofu ice cream would be as simple as coconut milk, sugar, tofu, and that would be it. However, what happened was that the ice cream, even after churning it,…
Carrot Cake Castella with Honeyed Goat Cheese
This recipe was directly inspired by a petit four I had at Singular restaurant in Kyoto. When we ate there, they used carrot juice to make this light and airy cake, and paired it with a soft whipped cream cheese topping. Castella is a type of cake that originated from Portugal, but has since made…
Shio(koji)zake Salmon and Onsen Egg Rice Bowl
I was obsessed with eating shiozake salmon during my time in Japan. Every morning, my breakfast consisted of shiozake salmon, an onsen egg, rice, and a bowl of miso soup. This recipe is an homage to that, minus the miso(which is going into a different recipe). For those unfamiliar with the term, shiozake literally translates…
Gochujang Salsa Macha Rice Noodles
This recipe came about because I wanted to take the salsa macha noodles I made a while ago, but turn them 100% gluten-free and vegan. When I was fasting prior to my Hawaii trip, I had a lot of cravings. and these punchy, spicy, chewy noodles were one of them. Salsa macha is like the…
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…
Banana-Mixed Grains Tart
This recipe came about because I had a ton of super ripe bananas I needed to get rid of, and I wanted to get rid of these bananas in a somewhat extravagant fashion. I say somewhat because this tart has a decent amount of bells and whistles to it. Namely in the little craquelin choquettes…
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…
Black Sesame and Strawberry Lemonade Cookie Sandwiches
This recipe is a slight homage to a PB&J sandwich, but in cookie form. I have recently been obsessed with Sanritsu sandwich cookies(imagine two tuiles sandwiching a pleasantly sweet creamy filling), and wanted to try making a rendition of them. Instead of doing a buttercream or ganache, since I had leftover strawberry puree and a…
Freddy's Harajuku 