Freddy's Harajuku

Sticky Toffee “Cinnabon” Loaves

One of my personal favorite memories during filming Masterchef: Back to Win was when a bunch of us(i.e. Gabriel, Samantha, Dara, and I) ordered Cinnabon to where we were staying, and we just ate Cinnabon while trying not to feel stressed about the competition(before anyone asks, Bri had an appointment when that happened, or else…

Super Soft Mango Mochi

This recipe was directly inspired by the mango mochi at ECK Bakery in Houston(special thank you to my friend Amanda for taking me there, because the mochi was incredibly delicious!). So on my recent trip to Texas, I stopped by in both Austin and with my friend Amanda and her husband Jimin, we all went…

Egg Sandwiches with Homemade Milk Bread

This recipe is a thank-you letter to my mom, since she not only taught me how to make the perfect boiled egg, but gifted me with this super cute bento box, and I have been dying to use it to plate something. Between eggs and the bento, it just made sense to either do something…

Lu Rou Fan Rice Bowls

Lu rou fan, or 滷肉饭 as it’s written in Chinese, is a Chinese/Taiwanese dish that consists of braised meat, usually pork, with rice, and it’s usually served with pickled daikon and an egg that is usually braised or cooked with the stew. At least that’s how I was raised to eat it. The stew is…

Hanami Chiffon Sandwich

I’ve made it a point to make hanami desserts every single year, so I definitely did not want to stop that trend this year. Hana-mi refers to flower viewing, specifically the viewing of cherry blossoms blooming every spring. As a whole, this is meant to symbolize the beginning of a new year, or at least…

Coconut Bunny Cookies

These coconut bunny cookies were the brainchild of me wanting to make a cream cheese-based cookie, and me wanting to do something bunny-themed that was rolled in coconut flakes. What I love about cream cheese cookies is that they have this soft, melt-in-the-mouth texture to them that can only be accomplished by baking a dough…

Snow Bunny Dango

Inspiration was from Paper Mario, and Super Paper Mario, where there was an item called the Snow Bunny. From how they looked, a Snow Bunny resembled an usagi manju, which is a Japanese bun shaped like a rabbit. These manju are quite cute, usually being made with mochi, although I have seen baked varieties as…

Sesame Checkerboard Bunnies

I felt major FOMO when I saw so many of my fellow Asian bakers posting bunny-themed desserts during Lunar New Years(I was unfortunately in Texas during the week leading up to it with limited access to a kitchen, so I could not join in on the bunny dessert festivities nor did I have the foresight…

Open-Faced Pistachio-Strawberry Tart

I personally love the combination of strawberry and pistachio. Strawberries are tart, sweet, and are just such a beautiful red color. Pistachios can be crunchy, creamy, smoky, and salty. The two really balance each other nicely, especially when sugar enhances both ingredients separately. Strawberries with sugar is such a simple combination, but the sugar really…

Kinako Mochi Chiffon Sandwiches

Kinako is one of my favorite ingredients, I feel like it is highly underrated. Translating to “gold powder”, kinako is a Japanese toasted soy bean powder. It is very nutty, similar in flavor to Korean injeolmi or even just peanut butter, and it quite frequently used in Japanese desserts. For me, I grew up eating…

Yellow Chiffon Layer Cake with Blonde Chocolate

Truthfully, I never really understood yellow cake. I just assumed it was a vanilla cake with a lot of yellow food coloring in it. But turns out, yellow cake is not yellow from food coloring, but from the usage of butter in place of oil, and egg yolks. An abundance of egg yolks results in…

Molten Nutella Chip Cookies

While I was practicing intermittent fasting/crash dieting prior to my Hawaii trip, I was craving a lot of different things, which was both good in that I was able to really drill down on the foods I was craving to eat, and bad because I was craving food that actually tasted good, and was not…

Matzoh Crack Rusks

This recipe was the biproduct of me making Japanese-style sando’s and cutting the crusts off the homemade milk bread I used to assemble those with. After making all of my sando’s, I literally had a fish tub-sized container of bread crusts leftover. It felt like a shame to just throw the crusts away after all…

Tokyo Banana Chiffon Sandwiches

Tokyo Banana will always take me back to trips to Japan, where I would eat the soft fluffy snack cakes, stuffed with a banana cream often. When I was conceptualizing a fun chiffon cake sandwich recipe, one of my immediate go-to’s was none other than Tokyo Banana. When it comes to banana-flavored desserts, I learned…

Matcha Cream Chiffon Sandwiches

Perfect in time for St. Patrick’s Day, my next chiffon sandwich recipe is for matcha green tea-flavored! I feel like everyone has at least had matcha in the form of green tea ice cream before, and what I love about pairing matcha with dessert is that sugar and dairy are great vehicles to balance out…

Thin Mint Lunchbox Cake

So in the rare instances where Bri and I get to hang out, cooking is always one of the things we do together. We wanted to bake a cake together, and it just made sense to do mini lunchbox cakes, since then we could have more cakes that way. One particular trend I have been…

Boozy Grasshopper Pie

This dessert was a bit of an unintentional classic for me. I made my first grasshopper pie back in 2016, when I was asked to help cook for a Thanksgiving banquet at Boston University for about 90 people. I was in charge of the desserts, and grasshopper pie was one of the desserts that I…

Caviar Egg Tarts

Somewhat inspired by my trip to Oahu, where we ate at a restaurant called Senia. One of the dishes we were served were these egg tarts, which were savory, filled with an egg salad mixture, and topped with caviar. Now eggs and caviar are a classic combination. Eggs are custardy and rich, and caviar adds…

Matcha Namelaka Mille Feuille

Whenever I think of mille feuille, I actually think of my friend from college, Sena. We took some boring math general-education class together, and one day while we were bored, we were talking about our favorite desserts, mine being financier, and hers being mille feuille. A mille feuille, translated from French to mean “a million…

Matcha Kokedama(Moss Balls)

Kokedama are these decorative moss ball plants that are super popular in Japan. They are used as planters for other plants more often than not, and they give any room a pleasant, earthy aesthetic that I just adore. My first time seeing a kokedama was when I was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, where they…