I will be honest in that this dessert was my attempt to pair some ingredients together that felt like they would go together, but the plating was clunky to put it lightly. I had purple sweet potato namelaka, which is a white chocolate-based whipped mousse, kinako-almond crunch, which is smoky, nutty, and buttery, purple sweet…
Tag: baking
PB&J Shortbread Sandos
After making the buttered and toast financiers using my bread slice muffin tins, I definitely wanted to do another recipe with them, but this time, shortbread sandos! I have been seeing shortbread sandwich cookies all over the internet, and I figured it would be a cute nod to do something like that, but with bread…
Creme Brulee Financiers “Toasts”
This recipe was the direct result of me seeing someone bake with these really cute bread-shaped muffin tins, and me wanting to do something similar. After scouring on the internet, and believe you me, it took a lot of creative word combinations on Google, I found them in a random website called AliExpress. So after…
Miso Caramel Banana Upside Down Cake
Whenever I purchase bananas, it’s always a struggle to use them up(without resorting to my beloved hummingbird cake). But then I remembered the idea of upside down cakes. They can be versatile, since you can use up a lot of fruit in both the caramelized layer, and in the batter itself, so it’s a good…
Purple Sweet Potato Tart
When I was making this dessert, I was reminiscing of a time before the pandemic, when there was a popular dessert chain in L.A. called Cafe Bora. They were best known for serving these aesthetically pleasing purple sweet potato desserts that were dusted in vibrant lilac purple sweet potato powder, and they were all the…
Swablu Mousse Cookies
I would be lying if I said this was my first Swablu dessert. That being said, compared to my first one, these cookies definitely captured the color of Swablu a LOT better. When it came to the flavors, I wanted to go with something a little more tropical-leaning as an homage to Swablu, since it…
Miso Bete Noir (Flourless) Cake
This inspired by the Black Mirror episode of a similar name(in this case, Bete Noire, which translates to “thing that people particularly dislike”), but with pastry always on my mind, I immediately thought of the chocolate cake instead. Bete noir is a French flourless chocolate cake, literally translating to “black beast”. For my variation on…
Corn-Strawberry Ice Cream Sandwiches
Whenever I think of a corn dessert, almost immediately my mind wants to pair it with some kind of berry. Corn is sweet and usually lends itself to creamy, buttery textures. Whereas with a berry, it will be sweet and tart. So the two make for a perfect contrast. Usually my default is pairing corn…
Nanaimo-Chip Cookies
This recipe was loosely inspired by a Nanaimo bar, which is a Canadian dessert featuring a chocolate-nuts-coconut water base, a custard layer, and a chocolate layer, all set into neat little chocolate bars. They are very rich, but they kind of remind me of like a Boston cream pie conceptually(at least in the sense of…
Smoliv Oil Cakes
I haven’t made a Pokemon-themed dessert in a hot minute, but I wanted to try my hand with one after I made this really tasty olive oil cake, and wanted to find a way to showcase it! So I figured, why not make a cake inspired by the adorable Pokemon, Smoliv? Smoliv is a Normal/Grass-type…
Sourdough Shio Pan Taiyaki
So a while back, I made these anko shio pan, but what I did not talk about was how I frozen some of the leftover shio pan, and eventually tried making taiyaki out of them! Taiyaki are a Japanese fish(sea bream)-shaped waffle, usually stuffed with either red bean paste or custard most commonly. In the…
Chocolate-Salted Date Thumbprints
This recipe was inspired by the combination of chocolate and dates. Both are a bit earthy, but one provides sweetness, while the other more bitterness. Combine that with a little bit of salt from the usage of soy sauce, and you have essentially a chocolate-salted caramel-esque cookie! In this case, we have a salted date…
Stuffed Red Velvet Crinkle Cookies
Stuffed cream cheese cookies had quickly become an addiction of mine when I made those cranberry bliss cookies a while ago. The tender, soft, buttery cookie just melts in your mouth, while it is contrasted with the creamy, tangy filling. So it got me thinking, what other flavors could I go for with this cream…
Sourdough Bolognese Pizza
While I was experimenting with sourdough pizza crust, I happened to also have meal-prepped a giant vat of bolognese(meat sauce), just to have throughout the week for potential dinners. Originally, this was going to be a bolognese pasta post, but I forgot to photograph that, and decided instead, let’s use the bolognese on the pizza…
Sourdough Red Bean Shio Pan
About a year-ish ago, I made sourdough shio pan using my sourdough starter Horacio. Shio pan is a Japanese pastry, literally translating to mean “salt bread”. I like making it from time to time, and I have made sourdough variations of it in the past with my starter! The funniest thing was that I did…
Egg-Free Hummingbird Cake
Hummingbird cake is my obsession. I love banana desserts(get your minds out of the gutter), and the concept of hummingbird cake, being this Southern hummingbird cake with Caribbean roots, is just so fascinating to me. Plus the name is just so pleasant and cute. My version of hummingbird cake usually is made with this brown…
Hojicha-Miso Alfajores
These cookies came about because I decided to test out making dulce de leche in my pressure cooker, and I ended needing to use said dulce de leche in a couple different recipes. So you can expect to see a few dulce de leche-based recipes in the horizon, with this being one of them! Alfajores(basically…
Bruleed Cheesecake with Sata Andagi
I came up with this by happy coincidence. I love when a lot of different factors or scenarios line up and I end up making a really cool dish. In this case, I was recipe testing a baked cheesecake filling, and happened to have more cheesecake filling compared to the crust I prepped. Rather than…
Peanut Milk Panna Cotta and Madeleines
This plated dessert was actually inspired by sweet peanut milk soup(花生仁汤), a popular canned beverage from my native Taiwan. I still remember the first time I had it, it was in my grandma’s apartment in the Shida district on a hot summer night. It was a milky beverage with these tender, braised peanuts. I was…
Semolina-Tahini Cake with Biko and Coconut
While I was going through my sugar fast, I was craving basically everything with sugar. This dessert specifically was one of those sugar-deprived fantasies I conceptualized around two desserts that are notoriously sugar-laden. One of the inspirations was basbousa, an Egyptian semolina cake that is baked with tahini for a nutty texture, and is normally…
Freddy's Harajuku 