Freddy's Harajuku

Blackberry-semolina cake with olive oil and Meyer lemons

I literally came up with this recipe because I went to the grocery store, and saw 99-cent cartons of blackberries on sale! I knew it was a sign from whatever powers that be that I had to make something with these, so I bought about three 6oz containers of them! I had a couple of…

Aurora: a “glow-in-the-dark” entremet

So before I get into the rest of this post, I want to clarify the technical misnomer of this cake. I used tonic water, which allows the cake to glow under black light. Different than actually glowing in the dark, but still really cool. That being said, this is actually the second time I have…

Thai Tea-Milk Bread Sticky Buns

So this recipe only came about because I had a ton of Thai tea powder, and I had to get rid of it somehow. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas, like macarons, panna cotta, ice cream, basque cheesecake, and pound cake, but then I realized it had been a while since I made anything with…

“Beautiful World”: a plated dessert

So I conceptualized this dessert around initially two flavors, being pistachio and olive oil. From there, I sort of expanded it to include rosemary and lemon, since I have fresh rosemary in my backyard, which has been blooming these beautiful flowers, and the lemon adds a nice acidity to counterbalance all of the other ingredients….

Cajeta-misugaru banoffee pie

I’ve made cajeta desserts, and I’ve done misugaru banana pudding desserts, and I’ve made banoffee pie desserts too. So I figured, why not combine all three? I mean for Pi Day, it just made the most sense to go with a pie that is an amalgamation of both banana pudding(custard, cream, wafers, and bananas) and…

Jade Fairy: a petit gateau

So this dessert went through several phases because I was not 100% sure where I wanted to go in terms of the flavor profiles. I knew it had to be green, and that I wanted to feature pistachio and chrysanthemum tea. For those unfamiliar with it, chrysanthemum tea is a popular Chinese/Taiwanese drink made from…

Matcha and cream roll cake

So I actually made this cake for my mom’s birthday, but I figured that the green color just made it perfect for St. Patrick’s and March, so I held off on posting it until then. The unique thing about this roll cake compared to other ones I have done in the past is that the…

Dadar gulung mille crepe(pandan and coconut)

So a lot of Asians grew up on pandan, but truthfully, I never did. I always hear people saying that it’s the “vanilla of Asia”, which I might call blatant B.S. to, because I did not grow up on anything with pandan at all. And before the pandemic, I never even had anything with pandan…

Chocolate-chestnut-matcha entremet

I was mostly inspired to make this because I wanted to make a really woody and vibrant-green dessert. Mostly because with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I had to get together as many green, Irish, beer, or gold-themed dessert ideas together as possible. So this would be one of them. For my components, we have…

Winter Glow: a plated dessert

I literally came up with this dish because a family friend gifted us Osetra caviar, and I did not want to squander it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Osetra caviar is harvested from an Osetra sturgeon fish, and it is one of the most prized and expensive kinds of caviar, second to only…

Vegan Milkbar Birthday Cake

So I did a rendition on this particular Milkbar cake years ago(ironically before I even worked at Milkbar). But I wanted to do a more true version of the original cake, this time making it 100% vegan. The beauty of it is that you cannot even tell that the cake is vegan! It looks exactly…

Chrysalis: a plated dessert

During my senior year of college, I made a plated dessert called “Sanagi” – sanagi is the Japanese word for chrysalis, or cocoon. The dessert itself was matcha pate choux with spun sugar, made to resemble a little caterpillar crawling into a cocoon, hence the name of the dessert. I wanted to do a more…

Something New: a plated dessert

I’ve been meaning to make this dessert for ages. I stumbled upon baobab(an African superfood fruit that tastes like citrus) when I was doing research on natural food colorings, and I was too curious for my own good to not buy a bag of baobab powder from Amazon and try baking it with. I have…

Red string of fate: a dessert

For the clafoutis:1/2 cup all-purpose flour1/4 cup granulated sugar1/2 cup milk1/2 cup heavy creama pinch of salt1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract4oz fresh raspberries, halved Mix ingredients together, sans raspberries. Divide the batter into 10 lightly lined cupcake molds. Distribute the raspberries into the batter as well. Bake at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes. Then freeze…

Sweet tofu panna cotta with chrysanthemum poached pear

I was mostly inspired by douhua, or sweet tofu soup, when I was conceptualizing this dessert. The idea of this silky sweet tofu that is swimming in a ginger-palm sugar-type of syrup just takes me back to Sundays at my local dim sum restaurant in Lomita(which sadly has since closed and been replaced by a…

Mapo tofu gnocchi

So this is a dish I made a while back for the Plant Your Vote challenge in the 2020 election. The concept was to post a plant-based dish, and this mapo tofu gnocchi dish is 100% vegan. I wanted to post it now, since Chinese New Years is coming up, and I wanted to switch…

True Kinda Love: a plated dessert

I really just wanted to try something fun with this dessert, especially since I adore using ruby chocolate. So I went with a ruby chocolate mousse, ruby chocolate crunch disk, a raspberry-champagne gelee-core, and a ruby chocolate ganache with tempered white chocolate wings. I named the dessert “True Kinda Love” as a Steven Universe reference,…

Sweet snow: a layer cake

This cake was a labor of love. In that it took me two days just because of how much setting and dehydrating that needed to go into it. We have layers of fluffy strawberry chiffon cake(using some rice flour in it for an even lighter texture), strawberry leaf tea soak so the cake doesn’t go…

Malted miso and chocolate layer cake: inspired from my Masterchef journey

So this layer cake was a rendition on the audition dish that got me my white apron on Masterchef. Even to this day, people keep asking for the recipe, so I figured I’d give it a little update and share it with everyone. While this layer cake uses almost the same recipe as the original,…

Nama chocolate mille feuille

I feel like it’s been forever since I did anything with nama chocolate. As a refresher for what that even is, nama chocolate, or “fresh chocolate” as directly translated from Japanese, is a set ganache that is dusted with cocoa powder or matcha, and served as truffles, typically on Valentine’s Day. It was made very…