Passionfruit is easily one of my favorite ingredients of all time. My dad has fond memories of eating a ton of them in Taiwan, mostly because they grow quite frequently there. For me, it is a reminder of my heritage and I just love the sweet-tart flavor of the pulp coupled with the crunch of…
Tag: baking
Banoffee Sticky Buns
I love banoffee pie. For those of you who do not know what that is, it’s a British dessert consisting of shortcrust pastry, fresh bananas, dulce de leche (caramelized condensed milk), grated dark chocolate, and whipped cream. It’s pretty decadent, like a lot of British desserts (trust me, that’s not a bad thing. I personally…
Red velvet-raspberry entremet
Now you cannot deny the beauty of a mirror glaze cake. You can try, but you are just kidding yourself. Since my last attempt at a mirror glaze cake, I have decided to have at it with another one, this time, a raspberry infused red velvet entremet. The design was actually inspired by my friend,…
S’mores gateau
I have done quite a few s’mores desserts in the past, but this one is different in that it is a cake-based dessert. I used graham crackers in place of 75% of the flour for the cake, and for the chocolate components, I did both a chocolate ganache and a chocolate panna cotta. I have…
Lapis Lazuli fruit tart
The inspiration behind this fruit tart came from the lapis lazuli gemstone. It is a naturally blue mineral studded with gold and white streaks. I wanted to also make this dessert an homage to my hometown of Palos Verdes, where wild fennel grows, and that’s where the inspiration to use fennel pollen came from. I…
Fruity ube layer cake with ube mini doughnuts
I’m too lazy to write a foreword for this, so I will keep it very short, sweet, and to the point. This cake was inspired by Momofuku Milk Bar, and I wanted to incorporate tropical ingredients, so that’s where the coconut, banana, and ube came from. I used blackberries as well, because they add a…
S’mores panna cotta: a plated dessert
This dessert came about two summers ago when I was really bored. And I mean REALLY bored. Although that summer, I learned how to do a lot of things, specifically in terms of plating beautiful desserts and tackling ingredients I have never used before. The inspiration for the dessert came from a couple different things….
Khanom buang: Thai street crepes
Khanom buang are Thai crepes, which can be either sweet or savory, and are typically found in stalls served as street food. The first time I ever heard about Thai street crepes was actually watching Iron Chef America, Battle Tamarind. The challenger, Hong Thaimee, was making these with her dessert, although she prepared a baked version….
Banana (milk) pudding with misugaru wafers
This recipe is inspired by my dear friend, Ellie. She is one of the smartest, wisest, and funniest Korean Americans I have ever met, and she also makes a mean banana pudding. Seriously, she could put Magnolia Bakery out of business. However, Ellie recently moved to New York, aka the home of Magnolia Bakery, so…
Blueberry-olive oil friand, lemon curd, mascarpone sorbet
This recipe is a tweak on a dish I have been making for years. Blueberry, olive oil, and lemon have found themselves in several of my cakes ever since I found out that olive oil cake is a thing. This particular rendition came about when I was cooking with my friend Carolyn, and we wanted…
Strawberry mirror glaze shortcake
This recipe came about because I wanted to do some sort of take on strawberry shortcake, but I didn’t exactly know what kind of dessert I wanted to do. Then I started to remember this dessert I had at Melisse in Santa Monica a few years back, and it was this pain per du (French…
Matcha sugar doughnuts
For my Advanced Food and Beverage concept, BA- (a 2 1/2 in one Japanese dining experience), we featured a morning bakery called Panya, which would turn into an izakaya (Japanese gastropub) at night. Panya boasted a lot of cute and simple baked goods and doubled as a cafe in the morning. One of our signatures…
Toasted soy chiffon cake with lemon curd cream and blackberries
So I first came up with this concept because my parents needed me to prepare a dessert for their friend’s 4th of July party (that I wasn’t even invited to)….bastards. Since they were all old anyways, my parents told me specifically to use less sugar….I’m starting to feel less salty about not being invited. No…
Chocolate-raspberry meringue pie
The first time I ever made a chocolate-meringue pie was for a Thanksgiving Potluck in the School of Hospitality Administration. Fun fact: the school called it a potluck, but it was actually just me and three other culinary learning assistants who slave labored catered the entire thing. I had to prepare five desserts with enough…
Matcha hokkaido cupcakes
I’ve been craving Hokkaido styled cupcakes ever since I saw them in the display of a bakery in Nagoya last summer. These cute little cupcakes with a tiny dollop of cream. Simple and cute is the easiest way to describe them. These kinds of cupcakes are often described as cloud-like, which is why I opted…
Peach and white chocolate upsidedown pound cakes
I literally made this recipe out of boredom. Now I could give you guys a long-winded story about how I went every summer eating white peaches grown from our backyard and how it made me look forward to the summer every year (this is a true story btw), but that’s not what I’m in the…
Seashell macaron with key lime kaya
I was actually inspired to do these macarons by two different things. First, my visit to Montage Resort in Laguna Beach. Secondly, a video on Instagram, where I saw people making these. I wanted to keep these macaron on the tropical side, so I filled with with kaya, which is a Malaysian coconut-egg jam, though…
Freddy's Harajuku 