I usually refrain from making puff pastry from scratch frequently, because it is such a time-consuming process. Chilling, resting, and rolling a butter-laden dough pretty much summarizes how you make puff pastry. Because you have to rest and chill the dough between rolling it out, it takes at least 90 minutes to make a laminated…
Category: Treats
Anything that didn’t quite fit into the other categories, and is “portable” or easy to eat while walking.
Spiced Chocolate Mont Blanc
Mont Blanc is a French chestnut dessert, usually consisting of chestnut cream, piped in a string-like matter to resemble the peaks of a mountain, and finished with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar to effect snow tops. Mont Blanc is literally French for “white mountain” for that reason. While the dessert is French in origin, it…
Chocolate-Hazelnut Langue de Chat
Langue de chat are one of my favorite cookies to eat. If you ever had a Milano before, it’s basically like that. Thin, melt-in-the-mouth cookies sandwiching a filling, usually chocolate-based. In this case, I went with a chocolate-hazelnut langue de chat. I love Nutella, and often get jars of it from Germany whenever we go…
Flourless Chocolate Cakes
A little earlier this year, I was tinkering around with a flourless chocolate cake recipe. Fast-forward a few months, and I was trying to think of a fun way to make a chocolate fondant-like situation. I envisioned this dainty but tall chocolate cake, similar to a molten lava cake, but firmer. I wanted this to…
Pumpkin-Maple Flan
For a while now I’ve been on and off experimenting with doing purins and flans using pumpkin/kabocha flavoring of some kind now. Fun fact, but purin(Japanese pudding, which is basically flan, or a sweet egg custard with a caramel layer) was the first thing I ever learned how to bake. We did not grow up…
Chocolate-Pumpkin Cheesecake Brulee
Way back when I first started as a baker, one dessert concept I had was a baked chocolate-pumpkin cheesecake cupcake, inspired by the Halloween colors of black and orange. While Halloween obviously is over(how we’re already in November, I really don’t know), I still wanted to make a pretty little pumpkin-chocolate cheesecake number, just in…
Savory Pumpkin Biscuits
Canned pumpkin puree is definitely convenient to use in the sense that you don’t have to break down, roast, and puree a fresh pumpkin, saving you hours of time there. That being said, recipes can be a little wonky in terms of how much pumpkin puree you need vs how much there is in a…
Aomori Apple-Ricotta Loaf Cakes
This recipe came about because I still had a spare Aomori apple lying around, and I wanted to use it to make something with the leftover ricotta cheese I also had. Yeah, I mentioned it somewhere before, but maybe 1 in every 4 of my recipes on this blog came about from me needing to…
Miso Caramel Apple Dumplings
First time I had apple dumplings was living in Boston; my friend Tina made them for us when we were having a baking night together back in freshman year of college. I literally had no idea what an apple dumpling was, come to find out, they were these parcels of baked dough, stuffed with caramelized…
Chocolate-Hazelnut Fondant
It felt like forever ago that I made a chocolate fondant, so I wanted to make one as we start getting closer to the holidays, and I wanted to make some more festive or celebratory desserts. Chocolate fondant is comforting, because it is a decadent chocolate lava cake-type of situation. In this case, I went…
Pumpkin Pie Taiyaki
Ever since I bought a taiyaki pan, I only ever used it once. And not even to make traditional taiyaki batter! Hilariously, back in college, I did make taiyaki a few times when I borrowed a classmate’s pan. However, I did not own a pan of my own until 2023, and even then, I totally…
Cereal Milk Cake Doughnuts
Cereal milk always takes me back to working at Milk Bar. I’ve been on an on-and-off air fryer cake doughnut kick lately, so I figured, why not try making some air-fried cake doughnuts using cornflakes? While traditional cereal milk involves toasting cornflakes then steeping that into milk, you can consider this recipe a cheat-method of…
Orange Blossom-Peach Malvapoeding
Malvapoeding(a South African baked cake soaked with a custard-cream situation) is one of those desserts I make infrequently. Not because I don’t like it(they are soaked fluffy sponge cakes that are very addictive), but mostly because they take an infuriatingly long time to bake for such little cakes – most cupcake-type baked goods are done…
Pink Peach Mille Feuille
I just had to make some fun pink peach desserts whenever white peach season rolls around. It’s so fun to take the peach peels, turn those into a simple syrup, and then simmering white peaches in those until they take on the pink color from the syrup itself. They are such a pretty garnish, and…
Ruby Kiwi Pate Choux
I first came across ruby kiwis in Taiwan in April, and they fascinated me. Now we have all seen green and probably all seen the yellow/golden kiwis, but reddish-pink ones sounded like an alien concept! The flavor of a ruby kiwi was just a bit sweeter than a regular one, but besides that, it tasted…
Chocolate Buttermilk Doughnut Bars
Whenever I get doughnuts on the weekend, one of my personal favorites is a buttermilk old-fashioned bar. These rectangular, craggy on the outside, fluffy and light on the inside doughnuts are just so addictive, just because there is so much textural contrast in one bite! I wanted to try making an air-fried version of those…
Meyer Lemon Baked Cake Doughnuts
When life gives you many, many lemons, you have to find things to do with them besides make lemonade. So when I happened upon a bunch of Meyer lemons, I already had a couple ideas in my back pocket. Meyer lemons, compared to your standard lemon, is a more orange hue compared to the yellow,…
Sweet Peach Tea Affogato
This recipe is my homage to sweet peach tea, combined with one of my favorite ice creams in mascarpone sorbet. Back in college, I learned how to make mascarpone sorbet by combining mascarpone cheese and simple syrup, freezing that solid, blending it with my immersion blender(I was the weirdo who owned one in his dorm…
Japanese Apple Pies
These Japanese apple pies were inspired by me perusing through multiple Japanese bakery tour videos on Youtube, and seeing these adorable little scalloped half moon-shaped hand pies. In Japan, apple pies are popularly made with puff pastry, and can range from either a traditional pie shape to the more portable hand pies. So I figured,…
Artichoke-Roasted Garlic Dip with Artichoke-Rye Crackers
This recipe was my take on artichoke dip, but made with feta cheese, confit garlic, and meyer lemons to give it a more Mediterranean feel! Artichokes are an ingredient that I just love, because they play off of cheese well. That’s because they have this sweet aftertaste that works with the salinity in cheeses like…
Freddy's Harajuku 