Freddy's Harajuku

Chocolate-Coffee Layer cake

This cake is basically a chocolate and coffee lover’s dream. Layers of dark chocolate cake with an Ovaltine latte soak, whipped chocolate ganache, a chocolate cookie crumb, cocoa-coffee French buttercream, and coffee tuiles. With each layer, I wanted to make sure they all brought different forms or textures of chocolate or coffee. We have the…

Coconut Sago with Yuzu and Milk Jellies

One of my earliest childhood memories was eating at this Chinese restaurant with my parents and being served a bowl of sago pudding for dessert. The tapioca pearls were swimming in this sweet coconut milk-based dessert soup-type of thing, which had bits of seaweed in there as well! That was the baseline inspiration for this…

Matcha-Azuki Basque Cheesecakes

I have made quite a few basque cheesecakes on this site. However, what sets this one apart from the other matcha cheesecakes I have made is really the flavors and textures of this one. I haven’t made a matcha-flavored basque yet, and since I had a buttload of azuki(red bean) paste leftover from a hilariously…

Hojicha-red bean-mochi madeleines

I made these madeleines half because I wanted to test out a few hojicha recipes, and half because I also made red bean paste using a pressure cooker, and I had to use it somehow! What I love about madeleines are that they are super customizable – since they are these cute, seashell-like cookie-cakes, they…

Violet Ohagi

So this recipe came about because I had a lot of red bean paste, and I had to use it up somehow. One of the first things that came to mind when I was trying to figure out what to do with the red bean paste was ohagi. Ohagi is a type of Japanese wagashi(confection)…

Chrysanthemum Douhua

One of my earliest food memories was going to dim sum with my parents on Sundays. We would be served chrysanthemum tea with everything we ate and we would usually finish off a meal of spareribs, sticky rice, and dumplings and fried radish cakes with egg tarts and a sweet tofu called douhua. Douhua, which…

Yuzu-Castella Strawberry Shortcake

One of my favorite childhood memories growing up was coming back from a long day at school, and being greeted by my mom with some sort of baked good from the local Taiwanese bakery. Sometimes it was cheesecake, other times, mont blanc, but one particular favorite of mine is castella. Castella is a fluffy sponge…

Pineapple Cake Madeleines

Weirdly enough, I haven’t really done anything inspired by Taiwanese pineapple cake, basically ever. Part of it stems from the fact that cooking with pineapples are a pain in the butt – cutting them up takes forever, they have too much water to cook out, and the fibrous texture is not the most pleasant to…

Brioche and pesto buns

I have been meaning to make these for a couple months now. A few years ago, my sister and I were watching Mind of a Chef, and more specifically, an episode that featured chef April Bloomfield. In that episode, she was making these “breakfast buns”, which consisted of puff pastry and a broccoli rabe pesto….

Pink velvet cupcakes with basque cheesecake mousseline

This recipe came up from a cake order, actually! The client was requesting pink velvet cupcakes for a Hollywood-type of party, so I wanted to try my best and embody a sort of glamorous and cute aesthetic. When it came to the cakes, I knew that I could do this super fluffy cake with pink…

Marge and in Charge: a petit gateau

When coming up with this recipe, I had a random epiphany that piping something like a mont blanc could cause it to resemble Marge Simpson’s hair. That and this idea came to me about two weeks prior to Mother’s Day, so I felt like that was a weird coincidence, and that I should just run…

Pandan-coconut sticky rice balls

So I was watching the latest season of Top Chef with my friend Amanda, and a contestant named Monique made this really intriguing Filipino dessert called biko. Biko is a Filipino sticky rice cake made with caramelized coconut milk and brown sugar, just to give it this super hearty and rich texture and flavor. As…

Honeybee Doughnuts

My initial idea when I came up with these doughnuts were to do these little puffy fritters and garnish them with a honey drizzle and bee pollen. But then I really got thinking about them, and wanted to do a more literal translation of what these could be. I thought first about striping the doughnut…

Blueberry-goat cheese financiers

I love financier. And not just because I worked in finance and therefore am a bit of a financier myself! They are French almond and brown butter spongecakes that are just delightful to eat and fun to make. The name for them, in theory, comes from the fact that the cakes resemble bars of gold,…

Rippled hazelnut and coffee brownies

These brownies came about because I was really craving something crunchy, fudgey, and rich. I had quite a bit of leftover ingredients and prep from a variety of other recipes I had made, and I kind of wanted to find a productive way to use them all. And that was really how these brownies came…

Hotcakes with purin and cream

Whenever I am bored, I watch videos of people eating at Japanese cafes. I don’t know why, but it’s always fun to live vicariously through other peoples experiences! In one particular video, I saw people eating this super thick Japanese hotcakes, which are basically just fluffier, cakier pancakes. I also wanted to do something with…

Ube-coconut layer cake

It had been a minute since I made an ube dessert, so I wanted to try another rendition, this time with a chiffon cake! Ube, for those unfamiliar, is a Filipino purple yam that is commonly used in desserts there. It does not grow naturally in America, so the best options you have for it…

Vegan and gluten-free pecan praline brownie sundae

I came up with this recipe because I wanted to see how challenging it would be to make a dessert that is both gluten-free and vegan. I wanted to take the most decadent, self-indulgent dessert, being a brownie sundae, and make it 100% free of animal products and gluten. Truthfully, making a vegan and gluten-free…

Chocolate-Whiskey-Tangerine Mousse Cake

My family friend was kind enough to gift me with their homegrown tangerines, something that I look forward to every spring. For this year, I wanted to go back to a project I did years back, which is recreating Lady M desserts in my own way. This time, I went with their Whisky Dark Chocolate…

Vietnamese Coffee Sticky Buns

There are two beautiful things about being on a diet. The first is obviously that you lose weight and in a healthier way. The second is that you continuously develop cravings for things you know you should not be eating, and that is a wonderful basis for some really delicious desserts. These sticky buns are…