I have been listening to an artist group called HarmonicBlend for a while now, and I just love their music. They have songs that really tell stories and follow themes, and their most recent album, Dreaming Children, features quite a few songs that I’m inspired to create desserts from. One of those desserts is named…
Category: Plated desserts
Whenever I like to dabble with plating, plated desserts are one of my favorites and go-to’s.
Miso chocolate cake with soy milk-black tea ice cream, sesame, and azuki jam
The inspiration for this dessert was Chinese New Years. The idea of a festive dish that embodies a lot of traditionally Asian flavors, namely the red beans and sesame. Red bean soup with black sesame-mochi balls is a traditional Chinese dessert, so this is a definite homage to that. The miso-chocolate cake really plays off…
Salted caramel pets de nonne with honey-chocolate milkshake
A huge proponent of this dessert’s inspiration came from milkshake and fries; I just love something crispy and fried and something reminiscent of ice cream. I wanted to do a play on that, but using something that is traditionally a dessert, so in this case, pets de nonne. Now for the 90% of the world…
Christmas is dawning: a plated dessert
The concept for this dessert originally came from watching The Next Iron Chef: Superchefs, all the way back in 2011. Chef Elizabeth Falkner created this really cool chocolate devil’s food cake with peppermint snow, inspired by Christmas, and I wanted to do something that was a nod to that, since I finally have the tapioca…
Eternal memories: a plated concept
I was inspired to create this concept from a song by Crystal Kay of the same name. The chorus talks about finding yourself, despite how difficult that may be to do so. The song just reminded me of my own culinary journey so to speak, coming up from being a vegan cupcake baker to a…
Blueberry dreams: a plated concept
This dessert came about when I was watching a shoujo anime, “Kobato” and I was inspired by a character named Ioryogi, being this outwardly cute blue dog creature, and his love of baumkuchen, a circular German layered cake that resembles the rings or layers of a tree. Normally, baumkuchen is made on a spit roast…
Tale of two princes: a plated concept
This dessert is a literal translation of who I am. It features two princes in the form of desserts, being the Prince of the Sky, and the Prince of the Snow. The Prince of the Sky represents my hometown of Palos Verdes, where wild fennel and peacocks foam; fennel is featured in four applications in…
La fraise au trois lait: strawberry in three milks
This dessert came about when my friend Aria requested an interestingly flavored strawberry ice cream. So I decided on strawberry-goat milk sorbet. And from there, I wanted to come up with an entire concept that circled around this ice cream. The result: la fraise au trois lait, or the strawberry in three milks. I wanted…
Passionfruit Souffle
Passionfruit is easily one of my favorite ingredients of all time. My dad has fond memories of eating a ton of them in Taiwan, mostly because they grow quite frequently there. For me, it is a reminder of my heritage and I just love the sweet-tart flavor of the pulp coupled with the crunch of…
S’mores panna cotta: a plated dessert
This dessert came about two summers ago when I was really bored. And I mean REALLY bored. Although that summer, I learned how to do a lot of things, specifically in terms of plating beautiful desserts and tackling ingredients I have never used before. The inspiration for the dessert came from a couple different things….
Beignets with ovaltine-mascarpone affogato and dark chocolate custard
I had this craving for beignets one night when I saw a video of my friend who went to the infamous Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and got to record them making these beautiful, cloud-like beignets and serving them with a nice cup of coffee. So, because I went to school in Boston at…
Wind chime in dirt: a plated dessert
I was inspired to make this dessert when I saw a Japanese wind chime, also called 江戸風鈴 (edo fuurin), just laying on my desk, and thought “maybe that would be fun to create a dessert from.” After deciding that I could replicate the entire wind chime using sugar for the glass dome and either white…
Dreaming Sea Angel: a tropical dessert
The inspiration for this dessert came from a game I saw on YouTube, called Dreaming Mary. It’s a side scrolling indie horror game about an innocent little girl named Mary who was heavily implied to be raped by her pervert uncle, and it focuses on how she manages to escape from being imprisoned by finding a…
Bee pollen baklava
I can’t believe it took me this long to finally post a recipe that features homemade phyllo. Fun fact: I learned how to make phyllo from scratch the Montenegrin way from watching the Australian cooking competition, My Kitchen Rules, when a contestant, Zana, this snarky, germaphobic, perfectionist Montenegrin-Albanian lawyer made her own phyllo from scratch quite…
Coconut cream chiffon cake
Now this cake is one of my favorites. I love making coconut cream chiffon cake because not only is it delicious, fluffy, creamy goodness, but if you don’t like it, you can go shove a coconut up your ass like half of the ignorant little shits I went to high school with then you don’t have…
Blueberry-olive oil friand, lemon curd, mascarpone sorbet
This recipe is a tweak on a dish I have been making for years. Blueberry, olive oil, and lemon have found themselves in several of my cakes ever since I found out that olive oil cake is a thing. This particular rendition came about when I was cooking with my friend Carolyn, and we wanted…
Prickly pear-blackberry sorbet
I love using cactus pear (also called prickly pear or xoconostle) in sorbets. One of the first ice creams I have ever made was actually a prickly pear-orange sorbet back in my sophomore year of college (where I didn’t even have an ice cream machine, just an immersion blender). For this recipe, I added in…
Miso-butterscotch-togarashi mochi ice cream
This recipe was inspired by a dish I tasted during the Spring Break of my freshman year. It was at Hinoki and the Bird, a restaurant in Century City, and the dessert itself, it sounded really gross. I’ve had terrible miso dessert experiences in the past, such as this miso creme brûlée that tasted like spray…
Freddy's Harajuku 