Freddy's Harajuku

Gluten-free coconut-lime cheesecakes

I have been craving Magnolia Bakery’s lime and coconut cheesecake since I had it years ago when I visited New York. While one can make the argument that I could just drive to Downtown L.A. to get it, I’m lazy. Lazy enough to try making my own version of it, anyways. So for the cake,…

Red velvet loaves with whipped cream cheese

I will admit that red velvet is a guilty pleasure of mine. I love to talk a ton of crap about it being a red-colored chocolate cake, but I still go out of my way to order it whenever I’m at a bakery and want to buy more than just one flavor of cake or…

Kirimochi waffles

This is literally the simplest recipe I have ever posted on this blog. Mostly because it was something I thought of randomly when I was watching videos of Japanese chefs making yakimochi. Yakimochi is a grilled mochi, made by slowly charring kirimochi. Now, kirimochi is a mochi that is slowly dried out until it is…

Tea-smoked duck with green apple and onion

I came up with this dish because I was thinking about what the prettiest duck dish I could make, and this is what I thought up of. I love to tea smoke proteins, and I love tea smoked duck. Smoking the duck in chamomile tea specifically gives it a pleasant earthiness, and I wanted to…

Mango lassi mille feuille

So with this dessert, I wanted to combine Indian flavors with Albanian and French techniques. For the pastry, I went with a homemade phyllo, brushed with ghee just to guarantee that beautiful browning on the dough. With the filling, I did a yogurt and cardamom namelaka, which is a ganache that is whipped. For this…

Fried “cauli”-mari with tofu aioli

I literally only came up with this because of a conversation I had with a friend, Christy. She was making salt and pepper cauliflower, and I realized that cauliflower stems could be cut to resemble calamari! Hence the name, “cauli”-mari. But stems on their own don’t taste that good, so I opted to marinate the…

Get your wish: a chocolate-lucuma tart

I would be lying if I said that this recipe did not take forever to make. A huge reason why I don’t do tarts(besides my sexuality) is that there is a lot of temperature and waiting involved. If the dough gets too warm, it won’t hold its form. If it’s too cold, it could be…

Roasted cornish hen with umami rice cabbage roll

I really came up with this dish because I wanted to do a cornish hen dish for a while, but was not fully sure where to go with it, initially. I wanted to do something a little European, but obviously a little Asian as well, and that’s how I came to the dish I came…

Incan gold cookies

I don’t even know why I didn’t think about making these cookies the first time I ever used lucuma. It just makes so much sense, especially since corn is such a huge part of Peruvian cuisine, and lucuma, being a fruit that tastes exactly like caramel, would compliment that so perfectly! For these cookies, I…

Chocolate, olive oil, and sea salt macarons

I just randomly had the urge to make macarons with this specific flavor combination one day. The idea of rich dark chocolate against grassy olive oil, and sea salt to just bring both together, it made a lot of sense to me. Kind of like a chocolate zucchini bread, which as weird as it sounds,…

Strawberry tiramisu

So I have made many a strawberry tiramisu in the past. Ever since I was a student in college, I just loved the idea of making tiramisu that were not traditionally flavored. Ever since I moved back to Los Angeles, I fell in love with the aesthetic of the tiramisu at Cafe Bora in Koreatown,…

Milk bread gua bao

So I had been reading the Mr. Jiu’s cookbook recently, and something that inspired me was seeing them take milk bread dough and turning that into buns. I have done something like that before with my “Fred bread”, but seeing it done by a restaurant that I really look up to just validates my decisions…

Banana’s Foster Souffle Pancakes

I really wanted to make souffle pancakes again for quite some time, so that’s where this recipe really came about from. I just love how soft and fluffy these pancakes are, since they use a heavily whipped egg white just to get them to that light and airy consistency. The Banana’s Foster adds a playful…

Oatmeal (Rum) Raisin Icebox Cake

So I have feelings about oatmeal raisin cookies. Mostly of disappointment because it looks like a chocolate chip cookie from afar, and when you bite into it and realize that you have been deprived of your chocolate experience, only for it to be replaced with dried fruit, it’s infuriating. That being said, I wanted to…

Yuzu-white chocolate-macadamia pound cakes

I actually grew up eating tons of pound cake, but never really making it from scratch. I honestly did not even realize that what makes pound cake so unique is that while it is an American-style cake batter, it does not use any leavening! Typically, you would see French and European sponge cakes use eggs…

Sesame shortbread sandwiches

I feel like every Asian household has that metal tin of cookies in it. At least every household that that I’ve been to. One of my favorites were this cookie sandwiches that would usually feature some kind of cream in them. So that’s what these sandwiches were meant to be an homage to. I went…

Tangerine and chocolate “snack cakes”

These were kind of my ode to a Hostess cupcake. A dark chocolate cake with a cream inside and ganache on top. Fudgy, delicious, and definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. For this rendition, I went with a chocolate cake that uses black cacao, which has this almost fruity quality to it from being an…

Milk tea cookies with chewy “boba” bits

I really was inspired to make this dessert from seeing all of the “boba” desserts on Instagram. Truthfully, the idea of eating boba that is not warm and soft doesn’t appeal to me, and more times than not, boba sitting out on a pie or a cheesecake will turn hard and cold really quickly. Then…

Strawberry and pistachio pate choux

I was pretty happy with how these puffs came out, considering that ever since I got some Strawberry Inspiration(naturally strawberry flavored chocolate) couverture from Valrhona, I wanted to do a strawberry and pistachio dessert. There was something about crunchy and salty versus sweet and tart which just sounded like a fun combination, and while the…

Dango with black rice pudding and salted rice milk

I love mango sticky rice. The stewed down rice with salty coconut milk and juicy mango, it’s a fun combination to play around with. For this particular recipe, I wanted to accentuate that classic Asian dessert by doing rice three ways, and mango two ways. For the rice, I used black rice and did a…