I feel like almost any American can recall a time in their lives when they go to a birthday party and are presented with plain vanilla cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles, either baked into the cake, or speckled on top of a vanilla or chocolate frosting. It is honestly such a basic thing, cake, frosting, sprinkles,…
Category: Treats
Mamey and Thai Tea Popsicles
I am personally quite surprised that I have not made popsicles since 2022, nor have I worked with mamey sapote since 2020! It has been a minute since I last utilized my popsicle molds, and since I wanted to make a mamey dessert, it just all fell into place to make these mamey popsicles! In…
Baymax Sourdough Loaves
I have been seeing videos of people enjoying these adorable Baymax sourdough loaves at Disneyland’s San Fransokyo, and I just had to take a swing at making these myself. I will be honest, I felt a bit read when I saw the first Big Hero 6 trailer, mostly because Hiro Hamada totally ripped off my…
Sourdough Crostini with Figs and Ricotta
This recipe was the byproduct of me needing to use up a tub of ricotta cheese, having sourdough bread already made, and me purchasing figs from the farmers market on an impulse buy. Hilariously enough, it all worked out in the sense that I have three things, being bread, figs, and cheese, that go gorgeously…
Midnight Snack: a petit gateau
I was craving a Hostess cake, and that literally was what inspired me making these. I specifically wanted a chocolate cake stuffed with a marshmallow, with a chocolate ganache glaze. So I figured, especially since I had a lot of spare egg whites lying around, that I could use one of the egg whites to…
Date and Assam Milk Tea
I was randomly craving wintermelon tea late at night, but the nearest boba store was already closed, as were the Asian grocery stores, and as much as I would love to make wintermelon tea from scratch, I neither had a fresh wintermelon to do that nor the patience – for context, wintermelon tea is made…
Chocolate Olive Oil Cakes
Olive oil cake is one of those kinds of cakes that you are starting to see more and more of recently. Almost every cafe in Los Angeles sells an olive oil cake, or some variation on one. However, I don’t really see chocolate-olive oil cakes often – funnily enough, olive oil gelato with chocolate and…
Boston Cream Pie Lamingtons
Lamingtons are a popular Australian dessert/snack. Traditional lamingtons do not have a filling, and are usually just cubes of cake, glazed with chocolate, and rolled in coconut. In my case, I wanted to combine them with another favorite dessert of mine, being the Boston cream pie. Boston cream pie features a vanilla cake, a custard…
Mt. Pav-lava with Dinosaur Shortbreads
My friend Samantha(from season 9 and Back to Win) gifted me with these dinosaur cookie cutters back in January, but truthfully, I had zero ideas on what to do with these. I am not a major dinosaur enthusiast(I never even watched Jurassic Park, though I DID grow up on The Land Before Time rip Little…
Dubai Chocolate Eggs
About a year ago, I had on my to-make list to do a knafeh-themed dessert, but where there was going to be an egg motif going on, with the kataifi(also called shredded phyllo) being used as like a nest around this knafeh-egg-thing. I never got around to doing it because life happened(i.e. my now ex-workplace…
Mint Chip Gelato Sundae
Mint chip ice cream is hilariously enough, my earliest memory. My mom, when we first immigrated to America, would take me and my sister to the Baskin Robbins nearby where we lived in Torrance(hilariously, that Baskin Robbins is STILL in business to this day, I now as an adult live walking distance from there, and…
Almond Tofu-Apricot Phyllo Pie
There are those moments where I have a culinary brain child that just hits on every single level of deliciousness and nostalgia, and this pie is 1000% that kind of recipe. Almond tofu is a popular Chinese dessert, made from Chinese almond powder(made from apricot kernels – it tastes exactly like almond extract, which does…
P.O.G. “Pearl”: a Petit Gateau
These little pearls were inspired by a recent trip to Hawaii(yes, I have been to Oahu 4 times in the past 3 years, I am addicted. Well, that and I have a bunch of friends who live there – shout out to Ann and Lauren – so Waikiki along with Austin have been two places…
Crab and Chili Crisp Bagels
These bagels were a complete and utter brain child. I heard about Montreal style bagels – bagels that are boiled with a little bit of honey and have a soft, chewy crust – and wanted to make my own! However, a bagel on its own, while tasty, can be a little one-note, and I wanted…
Mini Osmanthus and Peach Pies
This recipe came about because I saw peaches in the grocery store, remembered that peaches were in season, grabbed a bunch, and then realized that I actually needed to do something with said purchased peaches. The first thing that came to mind was doing this large peach pie with a pretty lattice on top, and…
Kecap Manis Kouign Amann with Peanut Caramel
I have been trying to make more laminated dough recipes this year, since I discovered the wonderfulness that is Costco purchasing my butter – the sheer amount of butter I can stock up means that I can tackle the more classically French, butter-centric recipes that I usually stayed away from to conserve my butter for…
Brown Butter Toffee Chip Cookies
I occasionally love to dabble and adjust my cookie recipe, because I love how tweaking an ingredient or a technique in the recipe can result in dramatically different kinds of cookies. In the case of these cookies, I was trying to go with this super toasty, brown butter-forward cookie studded with chocolate, cacao nibs, and…
Matcha Swirled Conchas
So I was not actually trying to make concha originally. These were going to be swirled matcha melon pan, but what ended up happening was that between how I was attempting to swirl my matcha and regular bread dough together and how my topping dough baked, I ended up with breads that looks like conch…
Miso-Milk Tea Chip Cookies
These cookies are on the verge of being an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink scenario – there is assam tea powder, miso paste, brown butter, and about four kinds of chocolate. As I was making these cookies, I started out with making a giant vat of brown butter, threw some miso into that, and as I was whipping that…
Black Sesame-Blueberry Swirled Baked Cheesecake
So I made the (can be seen as some as a) mistake of purchasing a Costco container of blueberries, and the consequence of doing that is now I have more blueberries than I know what to do with. I personally have always loved blueberry compote or jam on top of a baked cheesecake, so my…
Freddy's Harajuku 