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…
Tag: baking
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Raspberry red velvet doughnut creams
I feel like the hallmark to a great baker is how they approach the simpler things. For me, whenever I order multiple cupcakes from a bakery, one flavor is always red velvet. The simple reason is because with red velvet, there are a few criteria that need to be met: the cake must be red,…
Yakudo: a plated dessert
With this dessert, I wanted to just focus in on two flavors: chocolate and passionfruit. I really love the contrast between dark and bitter and bright and tart, so putting the two together just made perfect sense. For my components, we have a dark pate choux with passionfruit inspiration namelaka, dark chocolate mousse, dark chocolate…
Chocolate and kinako blanc manger
This was honestly one of the simplest desserts I have made in a while. Mostly because I made it to get rid of some spare ingredients I had lying around. I love blanc manger, which is a set milk-based mousse, similar to panna cotta. The key difference is that blanc manger uses starch to set…
Coconut-chocolate-caramel cake
In a lot of ways, this cake is almost a German chocolate cake, and almond an Almond Joy cake. If I swapped the macadamia nuts with pecans, it’s basically German chocolate. If I omitted the caramel and swapped the macadamia for almonds, we have Almond Joy. This cake features chocolate, coconut, macadamia nuts, and salted…
Blueberry pie doughnut creams
I feel like I haven’t been baking a ton of doughnut creams lately, and I LOVE making doughnut creams…for the most part. They consist of a baked cake, a set mousse, a mirror glaze, and at least one or two cute or unique toppings. The reason I tend not to make them often is because…
Dulcey-piña colada cake
So I made this cake for my friend, Carolyn, specifically on her birthday. She was hardcore craving a “toasty, tropically flavored” cake, and she literally gave me a list of what she wanted. She wanted a coconut cake with crunchy macadamia nuts, something with pineapple, but it had to be cooked, toasted coconut, and something…
Sunburst: a plated dessert
I named this dessert ‘Sunburst’ after a Tobu and Itro song that came out a while ago of the same name. And also for my Chinese namesake, which translates to Winter Morning Sun. I had to use sesame since it is a favorite ingredient of mine, and I paired it with sea buckthorn to add…
New Rules: a plated dessert
For me, this dessert was all about trying a couple of new things. Using gjetost cheese in a fonduta was a new idea, and playing around with more savory things like carrots and pairing that with mugicha, which is a barley tea. I also featured yuzu in this dessert as well, since the sort of…
Keep on keeping on: a roll cake
I have wanted to make a vertical roll cake again for quite a while. They’re a lot of fun because visually, they resemble trees! Whenever I think about Christmas, I obviously have to think of yule logs or bouche de noels. Those are roll cakes that are decorated to look like a freshly cut log….
Persimmon-gjetost-walnut cake roll
I love persimmon season so much. Mostly because the fruit itself can be used in a variety of ways. Persimmon are like the opposite of corn, where fresh corn is sugary and as it sits, those sugars convert to starch and the corn gets less sweet, but more creamy. With persimmon, it starts out starchy…
Sea buckthorn torte
This cake is my homage to sachertorte. For those of you unaware of what that is, sachertorte is a Viennese chocolate cake that has a thin layer of apricot jam inside of it, and it is covered in a beautiful chocolate glaze. It is a highly technical and iconic cake to Austria, to the point…
Blonde chocolate and brown butter mochi Madeleines
I was really inspired to make these from my friend, Ann, who sells a lot of butter mochi products in her business, Pair of Pears. She does these really delicious and toothsome butter mochi doughnuts and brownies, and it made me garner a much larger appreciation for it. For those of you unfamiliar with it,…
Blood orange and sour cherry shortbreads
I wanted to make a really festive and classic shortbread flavor to contrast the kinako-palm sugar recipe I posted, so I came up with these blood orange and cherry shortbreads to do just that. There are some key differences in the dough besides this one containing gluten, however. Instead of using egg yolks, I’m using…
Gluten-free palm sugar and kinako shortbreads
These were literally just a fun experiment for me. Since we are in the holiday season, cookies are a must and a definite. I love doing different kinds of cookies and shortbreads, so I wanted to make some that, in this case, featured kinako. For those of you who are not familiar with it, kinako…
Freddy's Harajuku 