Freddy's Harajuku

Brown Butter-Cider-Biscoff Cake

This cake is the love child of a sticky toffee pudding and a cider doughnut. I wanted to do something festive with spices and caramel-y notes for this recipe, just because during colder months(yeah I know, I’m a Californian who doesn’t technically get those, but I DID live in Boston, so I know what a…

Polenta-Fennel-Yuzu Cake

So I was watching Next Gen Chef on Netflix and there was one contestant, Abby, who made a recipe very similar to this one for the first challenge, where the contestants had to work in teams to make a progressive tasting menu inspired by one of three famous CIA alumnus. Abby tackled the dessert making…

Icebox Cake Gingerbread House

For the holidays, I figured I just had to do something akin to a gingerbread house. Now I won’t like, I suck at decorating them. I admire those who can do all of the fancy isomalt or gelatin sheet window-pane tricks, because that requires a lot of precision, patience, and skill. But in my case,…

Yuzu Castella with Blueberries

This recipe kind of combines two of my old recipes, being my Blueberry Dreams baumkuchen and my yuzu castella strawberry shortcake. I love the combination of blueberries and citrus, since blueberries on their own have such a mild, sweet flavor, while tartness just adds a sharp contrast, keeping things interesting. Yuzu in particular is a…

Chocolate-Hazelnut Mille Feuille

I usually refrain from making puff pastry from scratch frequently, because it is such a time-consuming process. Chilling, resting, and rolling a butter-laden dough pretty much summarizes how you make puff pastry. Because you have to rest and chill the dough between rolling it out, it takes at least 90 minutes to make a laminated…

Bacon, Liver, and Onion Pasta

A while back, I made a liver and onions picatta dish, and it got me craving more calves liver. Which is hilarious because I love calves liver already. When I made that picatta dish, I went with lighter flavors, using a lot of acid, capers, and caramelized onions for a more dainty feel/contrast. So I…

Pistachio-Cherry Shortbreads

These shortbreads were made with a love for Italian spumoni in mind. Spumoni is usually pistachio and cherry ice cream, so the combination of the two is something I absolutely adore. Pistachios are nutty, smoky, and salty, while cherries are sweet and tart. In the case of this recipe, I used pistachio flour, made by…

Oat, Tonka, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

I still remember back when I went to Hospitality school, one of our courses was a semi-recreational cooking course – no, I did not go to culinary school, this class was basically a blip in my college education that was otherwise geared towards hotel operations. We had to work in teams, and basically execute a…

Spiced Chocolate Mont Blanc

Mont Blanc is a French chestnut dessert, usually consisting of chestnut cream, piped in a string-like matter to resemble the peaks of a mountain, and finished with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar to effect snow tops. Mont Blanc is literally French for “white mountain” for that reason. While the dessert is French in origin, it…

Matcha-Kinako Daisy Crown Shortbreads

I saw someone on Instagram making these cute ring-shaped shortbreads, comprised of smaller shapes that were arranged in essentially a crown/wreath shape. Aesthetically, I found that to be extremely pleasing, and also since it is a shortbread made of other shortbreads, that invited a lot of possibilities in terms of fun or different flavor combinations!…

Chocolate-Hazelnut Langue de Chat

Langue de chat are one of my favorite cookies to eat. If you ever had a Milano before, it’s basically like that. Thin, melt-in-the-mouth cookies sandwiching a filling, usually chocolate-based. In this case, I went with a chocolate-hazelnut langue de chat. I love Nutella, and often get jars of it from Germany whenever we go…

White Chocolate Snowprint Cookies

So this recipe went through a couple different test phases. I was originally trying to make funfetti cookies, but it turns out the sprinkles I bought weren’t bake-proof, so those cookies ended up exploding from the excess sugar content. Life lesson – make sure that you’re buying bake-proof sprinkles before you buy a quart of…

Snowmen Coconut Cookies

These coconut snowmen cookies were loosely inspired by a cute box of white chocolate snowmen cookies I purchased while in Niigata, Japan. The cookies themselves were simple designed, being two round disks with little circular bits to represent the arms, and they were dunked in white chocolate to finish. I wanted to replicate that, but…

Flourless Chocolate Cakes

A little earlier this year, I was tinkering around with a flourless chocolate cake recipe. Fast-forward a few months, and I was trying to think of a fun way to make a chocolate fondant-like situation. I envisioned this dainty but tall chocolate cake, similar to a molten lava cake, but firmer. I wanted this to…

Pumpkin-Maple Flan

For a while now I’ve been on and off experimenting with doing purins and flans using pumpkin/kabocha flavoring of some kind now. Fun fact, but purin(Japanese pudding, which is basically flan, or a sweet egg custard with a caramel layer) was the first thing I ever learned how to bake. We did not grow up…

Chocolate-Pumpkin Cheesecake Brulee

Way back when I first started as a baker, one dessert concept I had was a baked chocolate-pumpkin cheesecake cupcake, inspired by the Halloween colors of black and orange. While Halloween obviously is over(how we’re already in November, I really don’t know), I still wanted to make a pretty little pumpkin-chocolate cheesecake number, just in…

Maple-Acorn-Apple-Persimmon Entremet

This recipe was the end result of me being indecisive and not being 100% sure what autumnal ingredients I wanted to commit to. I wanted to do this acorn flour-maple situation, and then I started introducing apples to it, just to give the dessert more acidity. Then I happened to have persimmons that were REALLY…

Kimchi’s Cajeta Pumpkin Pie

Before anyone asks, no this recipe does not have kimchi in it. Kimchi is the name of my friend Brenda’s maltese. He is an adorable little pupper and is generally well behaved. Except when I brought this cajeta pumpkin pie for our annual Friendsgiving, and Kimchi decided to help himself to 40% of the pie….

Savory Pumpkin Biscuits

Canned pumpkin puree is definitely convenient to use in the sense that you don’t have to break down, roast, and puree a fresh pumpkin, saving you hours of time there. That being said, recipes can be a little wonky in terms of how much pumpkin puree you need vs how much there is in a…

Aomori Apple-Ricotta Loaf Cakes

This recipe came about because I still had a spare Aomori apple lying around, and I wanted to use it to make something with the leftover ricotta cheese I also had. Yeah, I mentioned it somewhere before, but maybe 1 in every 4 of my recipes on this blog came about from me needing to…