Freddy's Harajuku

Blue dreams doughnut cream

When I was thinking about a summery dessert, I was inspired by both sea salt ice cream from Kingdom Hearts and salted coconut-butterfly tea lattes. There is just something about that blue-white contrast that really reminds me of sunny skies and blue seas. The name “blue dreams” came from a song of the same name….

Seal tart 2.0

I wanted to improve the previous seal tart I created, mostly by giving the seals snouts, flippers, and a tail, and finessing the shape of the chocolate eyes. For this particular seal tart, I also used butterfly pea tea to color the ganache blue, to resemble water, and paired that with lime curd, and guava…

24 karat cake doughnut cream

The entire inspiration behind this doughnut cream was childhood treasure hunting. I have never made a carrot cake doughnut cream before, and I knew that this was the perfect way to incorporate a few wordplays into the actual concept. The base is a carrot cake batter, then mascarpone cheesecake, swirled with blood orange reduction, a…

Ring seal s’mores tartlet

Baby ring seals are honestly some of the most adorable creatures I have ever seen. They remind of me Asian babies in that they start out super cute, but somewhere down the line, they just let their cuteness go as time goes on. That disturbingly true sentiment aside, I wanted to capture the cuteness of…

Black forest izba cake

Izba cake (Izba is Russian for “cottage”) is a Russian cake made of rolls of pastry stuffed with fruit, typically cherries, that are then layered with cream and allowed to set into a triangular prism shape. The cross section when you cut into it resembles a mini house, which is why it gets that name….

Oeuf Wiedersehen: a plated concept

I was inspired by the Harmonicblend song, Auf Wiedersehen, which is German for “goodbye”, when it was coming up with this concept. I wanted to do a pun off of that, using oeuf, the French word for egg, and that’s when I decided that I needed to do a snow egg, or a poached meringue….

Rewind: a lemon-blackberry entremet

After watching the new season of Cardcaptor Sakura, I could not help but get addicted to the ending theme, Rewind. I wanted to incorporate the sun and moon and clock motifs into this dessert, so I opted for elderflower, lemon, and black currant as the main flavor profiles, as they best compliment one another, but…

Matcha jade layer cake

The idea of this dessert came from wanting to create a layer cake that was visually reminiscent of a garden. I wound up with a dessert that had the gradient of a jade stone, which is still not bad, so pleasant surprises, you know? When it comes to using matcha, getting it to the right…

Chocolate bombolini cake

This dessert came about because I had a shit ton of ricotta cheese leftover, and I needed to use it. I wound up making cannoli cream, which is made with heavily whipped ricotta and chocolate chips. I figured that it would be the easiest way to use the ricotta, since I was not about to…

Coconut chiffon-Thai tea ice cream sandwiches

I just love Thai tea. It’s fragrant, refreshing, definitely artificially colored, but when made into an ice cream, it is delicious. Now I didn’t want to copy Milk in Los Angeles and make a macaron ice cream sandwich, but I still wanted to make an ice cream sandwich nonetheless. So that’s where the idea to…

Sfogliatelle or lobster tail pastries

I first heard about these when I moved to Boston for school. The North End, also called Little Italy, had several bakeries that served lobster tail pastries. They were these crunchy bundles that were stuffed with a sweetened ricotta filling. Traditionally, the filling is a mixture of semolina, ricotta, citrus, and sugar, but I decided…

Corn cookie and strawberry cheesecake sandwiches

These little cookie sandwiches were something I whipped up because every Friday at work, we always have these meetings for associates under the age of 30, and I like to bring something just to make the meetings a little more fun. I… was actually surprised by how well received these were! I knew that the flavor…

It’s my life: a plated dessert concept

The name for the dessert was inspired by the Koda Kumi song of the same name. The dessert itself came from me wanting to do something unique, indigenous to almost every American’s life, and most importantly, to show that I don’t give any fucks about what others think about my cooking/baking style. I live my…

L’eclipse: the blue cheesecake

While I was sick with bronchitis, all I could think about was what I would bake the moment I stopped coughing my throat out. I thought back to my old cupcake-making days from high school, where I remembered one of the very first desserts that I have ever thought of: a blue velvet cupcake with…

Duck-scallion congee with duck fat-Chinese churros

Whenever I butcher whole ducks (this happens a lot more than you’d think, but I guess that’s the benefit of butchering whole animals), I love making stock using the bones, and then taking the scrap meat from the carcass and folding that into congee, which is Chinese rice porridge. When I was learning how to…

Italian Lemon Meringue Doughnut Creams

I just wanted to create a new flavor combination using some of my favorite ingredients. That’s how this concept came about. I love lemon and olive oil together, and herbs just perfume that. Olive oil desserts are so underrated, but I adore the rich, rustic quality that they have. For this doughnut cream, I prepared…

Na’an-lamb kofta dumplings with fattoush salad

I really came up with this dish when I was watching My Kitchen Rules and saw a pair of Jordanians, Sonya and Hadil, prepare a gorgeous fattoush salad. Fattoush is a Middle Eastern salad prepared with a lot of vegetables and a flatbread-type of component. For my take on it, I wanted to take the flatbread…

Seeds of heaven and earth: mini chocolate-mint pate choux tower

I thought of this dessert one late Thursday night when I was in a slump; I was starting to get bored with baking, just because I keep doing the same shit. Naked layer cakes, doughnut creams, the occasional ice cream and plated dessert. Bottom line, with this dessert, I was trying to do something different…

Russian Honey-Bunny Cake

The Russian honey cake, called Medovik in Russian, is very similar to the American icebox cake. It is layers of wafers or cookies sandwiching layers of cream. In the case of Medovik, you use honey-infused cookie dough, made by caramelizing honey, whipping that into eggs and butter, and slowly adding in the flour, little by…

Mixed berry naked layer cheesecake

I love cheesecake and I wanted to do something that represented the fun of being a kid. Cutting into a cake and exploring the different flavors hidden between the layers of cake, cream, and some sort of fruit-type of components, it’s a lot of fun. For my dessert, I wanted to take two kid-favorite desserts,…