I was lucky enough to receive a bunch of fresh kumquats from a dear friend, Celina, and I wanted to do something fun with them. I love pairing kumquats with chocolate, and it just made sense to go that route. It has been a minute since I made a cupcake, and I wanted to make…
Tag: black cacao
Gluten-Free Chocolate Milkbar Birthday Cake
So back when I worked at Milkbar, my least favorite cake to assemble was the chocolate birthday cake. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love eating chocolate cake. However, when it came to assembling this one, it was tricky. At Milkbar, at least for their actual bakery operation, each layer of buttercream needs to be…
Peanut Butter “Oreos”
One of my favorite cookies, Oreos are pure nostalgia for me. One of my early childhood memories was shortly after landing in Taipei, jetlagged, and eating Oreos with Taiwanese milk in our apartment in Linkou. I’m not sure if everyone knows this, but Oreos are actually vegan! I got my start in baking with vegan…
Oreo Langue de Chaats
Now I have been on a langue de chaat fix ever since I came back from Japan. I love how thin and light those tuile-like biscuits are(they are so feather-like that I almost don’t feel guilty eating 20 of them in one sitting), while the creamy filling is just melts on your tongue, and with…
Stracciatella Layer Cake
Unless you’ve been to a place that sells Italian ice cream, you might be wondering what stracciatella is. In Italian, it translates to “little rags”. And in Lombardy, stracciatella is a kind of gelato, that is creamy vanilla with shards of chocolate running through it. In other regions of Italy, it could refer to a…
Pumpkaboo Mousse Cake
Pumpkaboo is one of those Pokemon that made me fall in love with the otherwise incomplete games that were Pokemon X and Y. It is a cute little critter that resembles a Jack-o-Lantern, a bat, and a black cat, all in one, and it can come in 4 different sizes, with the super-sized one being…
Chocolate-Rose Quartz-Pistachio Cookies
So I have made a version of these rose quartz cookies in the past, but I wanted to revisit the original recipe I made during my time at Milkbar, which featured a chocolate cookie embedded with Turkish delight(also called loukoumi, and they are like these sugary, pink rose-flavored jellies). The Turkish delight, which are primarily…
Tonka Bean Black Forest Cake
Black forest cake was my birthday cake growing up for the first 13 years of my life. Not because I particularly liked it, but because we would always go back to Taiwan for my birthday/winter break, and celebrate it at my grandma’s apartment in Taipei. And the only cake that the bakery underneath her apartment…
Boozy Grasshopper Pie
This dessert was a bit of an unintentional classic for me. I made my first grasshopper pie back in 2016, when I was asked to help cook for a Thanksgiving banquet at Boston University for about 90 people. I was in charge of the desserts, and grasshopper pie was one of the desserts that I…
Togarashi-Walnut Mochi Brownies
I am a more recent eater of the mochi brownie, first having had one from my friend Ann, when she sold them at a pop-up in Venice Beach! And honestly, I am so annoyed that I never had one prior to 2020. Crispy at the edges, super gooey on the insides, it is the perfect…
“Gansito” Petit Gateau
My friend Frances once described gansito to me as “a Mexican Twinkie”. So that is what a gansito is, in broader terms. But more specifically, gansito is a vanilla snack cake with a layer of strawberry jam, a cream filling, and it is covered in chocolate. So it is like a Twinkie, but with strawberry…
Cocoa brioche maritozzo
This recipe came about out of a necessity to use up my sourdough starter. I made the mistake of feeding dark chocolate cookie crumbs to my starter, which while it enjoyed profusely, the addition of cocoa powder caused my starter to take on a leather-brown color and produce a cocoa aroma. So I had to…
Cacao Parfait
I came up with this dessert because I was having MAJOR choco-holic cravings. If you were looking to get chocolate-wasted from a dessert, this parfait has your number. I did this in the style of a Japanese parfait, which features less fruit, yogurt, and granola, and more ice cream, crunchy cookies(I made feuilletine), and cream….
Oreo Icebox Cake
I will admit it has been a hot second since I made an icebox cake. They are straightforward in the sense of being just layers of wafers and cream, and the fun is seeing how the cream softens the wafers, giving them that cake-y feel when you cut into one! In this case, I went…
Chocolate-Caramel-Sea Salt Cookies
These cookies were a hilarious experiment. I love aging my cookie dough by a few days just so that the exterior of the cookies get really crispy. For these cookies, I did that same technique, but because I also substituted the eggs with sourdough. From a baking standpoint, eggs provide protein to bind doughs and…
Misugaru S’mores Checkerboard Cake
This cake was the result of a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a strong desire to make a s’mores checkboard cake. This recipe is not for the faint of heart. It was complex, difficult, and honestly on a scale of 1-10, 1 being microwave fudge, and 10 being you’re screwed if you…
Molten Nutella Bouchons with coffee whip and hazelnut bark
So these were my entry to the Feed Feed’s holiday Nutella recipe contest! Basically we just had to make a recipe that featured Nutella. Initially, I wanted to go in with this super complex chocolate-hazelnut-coffee petit gateau that resembled a zen garden. BUT after looking at what kinds of recipes the Feed Feed featured(i.e. more…
Forêt de cauchemars: a petit gateau
This dessert literally only happened because I purchased a ton of cherries to make another recipe with, and I had to figure out what to do with them before they went moldy. Which is always a great motivator when you purchase way too much of an ingredient! So I went ahead and pureed my remaining…
Chocolate checkerboard cake
So I actually made this cake for a co-worker’s birthday – her name is Kristina and she is an incredibly kindhearted person and an extremely hardworking sales manager. During the pandemic, when we were extremely understaffed, Kristina literally held down the fort, despite that meaning she had to work 12 hour days for months. Since…
Get your wish: a chocolate-lucuma tart
I would be lying if I said that this recipe did not take forever to make. A huge reason why I don’t do tarts(besides my sexuality) is that there is a lot of temperature and waiting involved. If the dough gets too warm, it won’t hold its form. If it’s too cold, it could be…
Freddy's Harajuku 