Ever since I purchased a plethora of cute-shaped cookie cutters, I wanted to capitalize on that and use them in fun ways. I have been seeing a lot of these sandwich cookies or shortbread cookies with fun shapes cut out of the center of them, and I wanted to try my hand at them today…
Category: Treats
Classic Pan Con Tomate
I love pan con tomate. I had it for the first time in Jaleo in Washington, D.C., and it was such a simple concept – crusty, airy bread, rubbed with raw garlic, garnished with juicy, crushed tomatoes, olive oil, and sea salt. So straightforward in the components, and honestly very refreshing and light! The perfect…
Modern Pan Con Tomate
Originally was going to serve this recipe with homemade ricotta and whey, specifically using the whey in the crystal bread, but I opted out of doing that, mostly because even the classic pan con tomate doesn’t use ricotta cheese, so this recipe should not either. There are times when cooks, myself included, can get a…
Passionfruit-Coconut Choux
For the final white and blue dessert on my tea tower, I had to do a French pastry. It was between macaron or pate choux, and I opted for the pate choux, strictly because they were easier to present in an afternoon tea tower. I love making pate choux. It is the dough used to…
Blueberry-Yuzu Mont Blanc Tarts
One trick I learned a year ago was using upside down muffin pans to bake tart shells on. Prior to that, when I wanted to make mini tarts with muffin pans, I was lining the inside of muffin pans with butter/oil and flour, and then pressing the dough into them. However, doing this meant that…
Strawberry-Tonka-Mascarpone Sando’s
If you thought this recipe was going to be premade bread, premade mascarpone cheese, and fresh strawberries, you would be only 1/3 right there. I was inspired to do this from my trip to Japan(which honestly inspired a LOT of new recipes for me). I got some strawberry sando’s from Tokyo Station on my Shinkansen…
Butter Bear Pancakes with Kuromitsu
I was inspired to make these pancakes because of an Instagram post(and because I had to use up some eggs and some roasted white chocolate-sesame crunch before I left for my trip to Taiwan/Japan). The idea of these large, fluffy whole-pan pancakes, similar to the ones you can make in a rice cooker, just sounded…
Yakult and Muscat Panna Cotta
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Cold Brew-Butter Mochi Crumb Cakes
This recipe came about because my extremely talented friend, Ahran, launched her own product, being vanilla-flavored cold brew concentrate, with Coba coffee, and she was generous enough to gift me some of it! I actually enjoyed the product quite a bit, because you have the sweet fragrance of vanilla against the bitter richness of the…
Purple Yam-Yam Puffs
This recipe came about while I was making these during a bake-together with my friend, Ahran! The theme was to make fun or cute cream puffs with interesting flavors. Ahran did a coffee-mascarpone puff, using cold brew in the filling and in the pate choux, and glazing them in a cold brew ganache, which was…
Freddy's Harajuku 