This chocolate cake recipe is the very same chocolate cake that actually won me my white apron in season 10 of the American version of MasterChef! During the casting process, we had to submit four signature dishes that we could make in 45 minutes, and this was the one I had practiced the most (before…
Tag: baking
Semolina-Tangerine Upside-down Cake
Honestly, this is one the simplest desserts I have ever made. In that it’s literally just a cake with cream. The only real pressure point here is maintaining the moisture in your tangerines, and even then, that ain’t rocket science. For the dessert, we have a semolina cake, tangerine syrup, a layer of tangerines, and…
Blackberry-almond Arnold Palmer cake
This was a cake I made with my dad in mind, for his birthday. He loves to golf, so the Arnold Palmer is a caddy shack reference. He loves my lemon curd cakes, to the point where he has actually eaten a cake I made before I even finished decorating or photographing it before, so…
Oreo and Cannoli Pastiera Napoletana
Pasteria Napoletana is a traditional Easter cake eaten in Italy. Yes, I know that Easter just passed, but to my defense, I did not know that this was an Easter cake when I was making it/somehow, I did make it on Easter, but the post/recipe was written up later. Whoops. So, the cake itself is…
Blossom cake: elderflower, lemon, and bee pollen
The flavors for this dessert are inspired by two things: my current boss, as it was her birthday when I made this, and the British royal wedding cake for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. My boss, who I shall leave anonymous, just out of respect for her privacy, is a very kind, loving person, who…
Starry Wish: black sesame-coconut-tangerine petit gateaus
I was thinking of a way to utilize the many tangerines we had at home (fun fact, when you are family friends with citrus farmers in Southern California, you have a fuck-ton of citrus that you get to cook with). From that, I thought, why not go with an Asian inspired dessert? And not because…
Pistachio-lemon-blueberry layer cake
This cake sort of was the result of utilizing leftover/surplus ingredients in our house. It was made for a family gathering, and because we had a TON of lemons in our house that we needed to get rid of, this cake kind of was a huge no-brainer. I love making olive oil and lemon cakes,…
Matcha cheese tea doughnut creams
I love making matcha desserts. And I have recently fallen in love with cheese tea, which is where a whipped cream cheese mixture is added on top of your bubble tea, creating a really pleasant sweet and savory drinking experience. So I wanted to utilize that as the inspiration for this dessert. I have made…
Red velvet with white chocolate mousse
I actually made this cake to celebrate the birthday of my co-worker, Alex. She said she likes red velvet, so whomp, there it is. Traditionally, red velvet is served with a cream cheese frosting. However, I did not have cream cheese in my pantry, nor was I in the position to go out and buy…
Mint-chocolate mousse cake
I am always in the mood for chocolate cake. Souffles, lava cake, Hostess cakes, etc., I just love fluffiness with chocolate. I also love the pairing of chocolate with dairy, as well as chocolate with yogurt, so I wanted to use Yakult, which reminds me now and forever onwards of Jenny Han’s To All the Boys…
Matcha-sesame checkerboard cookies
I love making cookies, but one of the coolest kinds (and most common to find an any Asian bakery) are the checkerboard cookies. Typically, they’re chocolate and vanilla, but I wanted to do a different spin on them. So I went with the two most mainstream Asian dessert flavors I know matcha and black sesame,…
Red wine-chocolate cake with namelaka cream and chocolate ganache
“Am I going to die?” – My sister’s reaction to eating/hearing about namelaka cream for the first time when eating this particular dessert Since this needs to be established first and foremost, no, you cannot die from eating namelaka cream. Unless somebody has poisoned it or tampered with it or you choke on it, or…
Perfectly blue macarons
So it turns out that the majority of the time I have been making macarons, I have been measuring out my ingredients incorrectly. Whenever it was supposed to be 3/4 cups almond flour and icing sugar, I would do 1 cup. Which definitely would explain why mine would come out so overtly browned, lumpy, dry,…
Yogurt-peach-Turkish delight cake
This dessert came about because we had a fuck-ton of peaches in my fridge that we needed to get rid of. I love yogurt-semolina cake and I knew that it would have the perfect dryness in the crumb to hold up to the moisture in the peaches, so I went that route with baking them…
Semolina knafeh with glazed figs
I really wanted to make knafeh when I saw it in My Kitchen Rules, where Sonya and Hadil, two Jordanian women who were kicked off the show because they got into a fight with another team, prepared it for their instant restaurant. Knafeh is a Middle Eastern cheesecake essentially, soaked with a beautiful rose flavored…
Orange-chocolate poundcake
I keep watching these Korean baking videos, and even though I am not Korean nor do I understand the language, I can still figure out what the ingredients they use are and what techniques were because yes, it really can be that simple. I wanted to do a dessert that just embraced the orange-chocolate combination,…
Cookies and cream tres leches cake
The inspiration for this dessert actually came from Housekeeping Appreciation Week. Since our team was only 22 people, it was actually a doable task to make something for them. I wanted to make something amazing for the housekeeping team that works hard to make sure that our guests don’t realize that our hotels rooms have…
Meyer lemon Mimosa cake
When I was doing research on Lady M (I need to better understand my enemy to spite them) I came across a cake that was called a Mimosa cake. It was this cake covered in cubes, and it was vanilla flavored. Now, I was expecting champagne and oranges, so I was really disappointed at first….
Blue skies, blue water mirror glaze cake
The inspiration for this cake was from a song by the same name. Go figure, that’s like half the shit I post here, and I love it because my music is so “out there” and not mainstream that you all would not know that unless I told you in the first place. Bitches. As you…
Banana cream pie mille feuille
This was directly inspired by Lady M, which is why it’s called a mille feuille at all. In my opinion, it’s just a fancy banana cream pie that happens to use puff pastry. For the layers, I have a crust of homemade puff pastry, Chantilly cream, vanilla genoise, fresh bananas, and arlettes, which are caramelized…
Freddy's Harajuku 