Freddy's Harajuku

Textures of Soy: a plated dessert

This was my submission for the Chef’s Roll x Kikkoman Soy Sauce Challenge! Basically the challenge was to make any dish that highlighted soy sauce, and the winner could win a $3000 cash prize or a trip to Japan. For me, the money would be nice, but I love Japan, and any excuse to go…

(F)red Velvet-Berry Cheesecake Layer Cake

This red velvet cake recipe came about because I had leftover mixed berry coulis in my fridge and leftover graham crackers from the Graham Central Station cake, and I needed to figure out how to get rid of them. Initially, I wanted to do a ruby chocolate-mixed berry cheesecake, but I also wanted to do…

Pumpkin Toast with Koji Mascarpone

This is one of those rare instances where all of the ingredients for this recipe happened to be all there in my refrigerator already. I had leftover pumpkin from making a cake with it, I had bread from a failed milk bread sandwich attempt, and I had both heavy cream and koji as my usual…

Gulab Jamun Madeleines

Gulab (and angoori) jamun have quickly become one of my favorite Indian desserts. These little ghee-fried milk balls are soaked in a saffron-cardamom-rose syrup, causing them to have a soft, melt-in-the-mouth texture. However, I find that setting up all of that ghee to fry with takes forever, and it’s really expensive too. Ghee is far…

Chocolate-Rose Quartz-Pistachio Cookies

So I have made a version of these rose quartz cookies in the past, but I wanted to revisit the original recipe I made during my time at Milkbar, which featured a chocolate cookie embedded with Turkish delight(also called loukoumi, and they are like these sugary, pink rose-flavored jellies). The Turkish delight, which are primarily…

Fig Leaf Financier

For starters, this is a gluten-free and vegan recipe. I had to get that out of the way first and foremost. Secondly, you might be asking, what is fig leaf, and what does it taste like? As the name implies, a fig leaf is literally the leaf of a fig plant. It has an herbaceous,…

Kir Royale Mousse Cake

Whenever I think of a fancy flavoring for a cake, I immediately go to kir royale. Mostly because of Patisserie Chantilly in Lomita, where they do a kir royale mousse. With this classic French cocktail, you have the rich fruity notes of black currant against the light, tart notes of the champagne. It is a…

Pink Taiwanese Pineapple Cakes

Pineapple cakes, or in Chinese 鳳梨酥(feng-li-su), are these buttery, flaky pastries that are stuffed with a sweet pineapple jam. Honestly, I have never bothered to make them before, since it’s so easy to purchase them, and almost every Taiwanese household has them just lying around to snack on! However, I had leftover pink pineapple that…

Assam Tea Buttercream Cake

Growing up in a Taiwanese/Chinese-American household, almost all of our plateware was white and blue porcelain. To this day, I still don’t fully get why it was that color, but the pattern has really grown on me over the years. To the point where I really wanted to make a cake as an homage to…

Blood Moon: a petit gateau

For this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, I wanted to do a few different kinds of moon cakes. Some more traditional, and some, a new interpretation of the term “moon cake”. In this case, I wanted to do not one, but two petit gateau, both moon-themed. One would be inspired by the full moon, but the other,…

Moonlight Delight: a petit gateau

When Mid-Autumn Festival rolls around, that means it’s moon cake season! And while I do love moon cakes, I wanted to make a new interpretation of them, by making petit gateau(mini mousse cakes) with moon motifs! I wanted there to be two, one inspired by a blood moon using dark and red colors, and one…

Miso Eggplant Onigiri

Miso eggplant is one of those flavor combinations that I really wanted to dislike, but actually loved from the get-go. For context, growing up, my mom would always serve bitter melon with miso paste, which caused me to develop a bit of a gag reflex towards vegetables served with miso for a long, long time….

Om Ali with Pistachio-Cardamom Cream

I came up with this recipe because I had a lot of leftover brioche and phyllo, and I needed to use it up someway, somehow. Luckily for me, there is a dessert that literally can use up both, which meant that I did not have to sacrifice space in my freezer for either of those…

Cold Brew-Oreo-Tofu Rare Cheesecake

More times than not, when I was making a tofu or yogurt-based mousse cake, I found that after it thaws, the cheesecake has a soggy crust that is sitting in a massive puddle of water. Trust me, I learned this lesson the hard way not once, not twice, but three times. At first, I thought…

Chocolate-Peanut Butter Muffins

I am actually surprised by how few times in my life I have made muffins. Back before I even started learning how to bake, my sister would make these banana-Nutella muffins all the time, so you would think that I would have taken my hand at something similar, but I guess I just haven’t felt…

Black Sesame-Cherry Crostata

Sometimes a good recipe comes about because you have a TON of leftover components in your refrigerator, and it forces you to get creative. I don’t think I would have come up with the combination of black sesame and cherry anytime soon had it not been for the fact that I had leftover black sesame…

Blueberry-Yuzu Mochi Ice Cream

I adore the combination of blueberry and citrus. It just takes me back to living in New England, where the Maine blueberries and the abundance or either Meyer lemon or blood orange was such a common yet effective dessert combination. I also love making mochi ice cream, and plating it up in a presentable dessert…

Clodsire Mochi Puffs

Clodsire is a new friend-shaped Pokemon that is an alternate evolution to Wooper. In a way, it’s a Quagsire that decided to live life laying down, and somehow developed these purple spots on its back where it can spring out its poisonous spines. So despite looking hilariously adorable, Clodsire can be extremely terrifying. Luckily, these…

Maple Langue de Chat

Langue de chat are a thin French cookie, similar to like a tuile, or a Milano cookie. The translation to English is rather unappetizing, meaning “cat tongues”, but I can assure you that these cookies are quite addictive. In Japan, a popular method of preparing them includes baking them into ornate squares, and sandwiching them…

White Rabbit Carrot Cheese Tarts

I was inspired to make this recipe by the Pablo Cheese Tarts, which I was fortunate enough to have on my second last day in Japan. Those cheese tarts featured a buttery crust, and an oozy, gooey cheese filling, very reminiscent of both a basque cheesecake and a molten lava cake. I only bought six…