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…

Trio of Milkbread Shio Pan

So I had zero clue what shio pan was until the beginning of 2024 when I saw someone make shio pan and referring to them as “salt bread”. This whole time, I just thought that they were chubby croissants, and as someone who has studied Japanese for 5 years and lived in and visited the…

Vegan and Gluten-free Chocolate-Kumquat Cupcakes

I was lucky enough to receive a bunch of fresh kumquats from a dear friend, Celina, and I wanted to do something fun with them. I love pairing kumquats with chocolate, and it just made sense to go that route. It has been a minute since I made a cupcake, and I wanted to make…

Kecap Manis-Leche Flan Cookies

Kecap manis(pronounced keh-chahp mah-nee), is a sweet Indonesian soy sauce, made by boiling brown sugar with soy sauce, resulting in an ingredient that basically tastes like molasses. Typically it is used in nasi goreng(Indo fried rice), but based on the sweetness levels, it totally can be used in desserts. I was fortunate enough to be…

Imqaret-Sesame Cookies

I haven’t made imqarets since 2020, but I happened to have a surplus of dates(the dried fruit, not the Tinder kind), and I wanted to use them up! Imqarets are a Maltese biscuit, which can be either baked or fried, that is stuffed with a date mixture that is seasoned with orange blossom water. They…

Hidden Rose Apple Cheesecake Dorayaki

It has been a minute since I made dorayaki, but since I procured some hidden rose apples(very seasonal apple with naturally pink flesh), I wanted to do some desserts that utilize it, while also revisiting some old desserts that I have not made in a minute. Hidden rose apples are only available 2-4 weeks in…

Gluten-Free Chocolate Peanut Fondants

These fondants came about because I got a request to make “Reese’s Cup Bread”. Apparently there was a TikTok trend of someone making essentially banana bread, but using Reese’s Cups instead. Now, I love chocolate and peanut butter as much as someone who loves chocolate can love them together, but I do not really have…

Mini Croissant Cereal

Back in 2020, one of my pandemic hobbies was perfecting croissants. Fun fact, I used Buttermilk Pantry’s recipe to learn how to make them. Admittedly, it’s been four years since I last made croissants, since it took over a month for me to successfully make a batch, and I found out that using that Kerrygold…

Miso-Hojicha Royal Icing Shortbreads

I am forever grateful to the pandemic in that I was able to come up with several recipes that I would not have had the time to do if I was busy with my regular day to day. While yes, times were tough, uncertain, and difficult, I can look back at those moments in my…

Peanut-Crunch Oat Cookies

These cookies were inspired by a combination of junk food, overpriced movie theater concessions, and oats(just to make me feel less guilty about the fact that I used literal chocolate bars to make these). I feel that with oatmeal raisin cookies, the part that upsets me is biting into one, and being met with a…

Cheesy Scallion Hotteok

Hotteok is a Korean pancake, usually filled with brown sugar and walnuts, and pan-fried on both sides until golden brown. The yeast-leavened dough used to make it almost borders on a batter, because of how wet, loose, and kind of sticky it is. The reason why that consistency is optimal, however, is that when fried,…

Matcha-Hong Kong Almond “Yoshi Eggs”

Ever since Universal Studios opened Super Nintendo World, I have been obsessed with buying a Yoshi headband. To elaborate, Universal sold these cute Mario character headbands, with a mini doll of the character placed on the headband in a way where it looked like the character was laying on your head. I personally find Mario…

Souffled Nutella Crostata

Back when I was in high school, one of the recipes I made that was surprisingly well-received by my classmates was a Nutella crostata. I say surprisingly because when I came up with this recipe, it was mostly out of boredom. I still remember this because a classmate who really went out of his way…

Matcha and White Chocolate Shortbreads

So back in December, I made these gorgeous chocolate chip and cacao shortbreads that were encrusted in Indian sugar(gifted to me by the amazing Shari Mukherjee from season 10 of Masterchef!). I was obsessed with that crystalized aesthetic and wanted to bring that back for another type of cookie, this time, matcha-flavored. So I was…

Matcha Mooncakes

Normally mooncakes are eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival in the fall, but I wanted to do a matcha version of them, and that wound up fitting the green theme of St. Patrick’s Day as well, so I am posting these during March, even though I technically made these during the fall! What I love about…