Honey Butter Buns with Creme Fraiche

These honey butter buns are inspired by Japanese honey butter toast, but in sticky bun form. Honey butter toast is made by spreading a paste of honey, brown sugar, and butter around a piece of bread, and toasting that until the sugars caramelize, and you get this almost creme brulee-like exterior to the toast itself….

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…

Cheesy Broccolini Focaccia

This is one of those recipes that came about because I had a lot of leftover broccolini and was trying to figure out what to do with it. I still remember during the pandemic how people would make aesthetically pleasing focaccia landscapes, and figured, why not take a whack at it? Truthfully, I used to…

Streusel mit Pudding Brioche

This dessert was directly inspired by my visits to the German Christmas markets – if you have never been or don’t understand the hype, imagine the Disneyland Ride “It’s a Small World”, but that’s what an entire square in Germany becomes during late November/all of December. It is a wonderful sight to behold, and one…

Sourdough Shio Pan

Shio pan(or salt bread) is one of those Japanese pastries that I had a more recent relationship with, but one that I adore greatly. Soft, fluffy, vaguely croissant-shaped bread with a salty flavor, this was a great concept for me to use Horacio, my sourdough starter, in. Unlike with my previous shio pan recipe, this…

Sourdough Garlic Cream Buns

One of the many triumphs in my sourdough experiments were these sourdough garlic cream buns. This recipe was directly inspired by both the everything milk buns that were occasionally sold at EatDomi and the trending bloom bagel. In both cases, it is a round piece of bread that it cut to have wedges on top,…

Momotaro Tomato Sourdough Tartine

So I have made an extremely similar iteration of this recipe not too long ago using black mission figs – this recipe uses the same bread dough and the sweet and savory miso-ricotta spread, which I am obsessed with. But this time around, I wanted to use Momotaro tomatoes. Momotaro tomatoes are these light pink…

Sourdough Crostini with Figs and Ricotta

This recipe was the byproduct of me needing to use up a tub of ricotta cheese, having sourdough bread already made, and me purchasing figs from the farmers market on an impulse buy. Hilariously enough, it all worked out in the sense that I have three things, being bread, figs, and cheese, that go gorgeously…

Matcha Swirled Conchas

So I was not actually trying to make concha originally. These were going to be swirled matcha melon pan, but what ended up happening was that between how I was attempting to swirl my matcha and regular bread dough together and how my topping dough baked, I ended up with breads that looks like conch…

Trio of Milkbread Shio Pan

So I had zero clue what shio pan was until the beginning of 2024 when I saw someone make shio pan and referring to them as “salt bread”. This whole time, I just thought that they were chubby croissants, and as someone who has studied Japanese for 5 years and lived in and visited the…

Cheesy Scallion Hotteok

Hotteok is a Korean pancake, usually filled with brown sugar and walnuts, and pan-fried on both sides until golden brown. The yeast-leavened dough used to make it almost borders on a batter, because of how wet, loose, and kind of sticky it is. The reason why that consistency is optimal, however, is that when fried,…

Pierogi Bread Rolls

So these rolls were going to be something I would do for Thanksgiving, but then when my sister and I planned out our menu, we realized we have 4 different carbs, and we had to nix these rolls. That being said, the idea was such a good one that I still wanted to make these!…

Chocolate Chip-Miso Caramel Bread Puddings

Dislike bread pudding for two main reasons – I grew up watching Chopped, and everyone made bread pudding/French toast in the dessert round, and my ex loves bread pudding. That being said, my dear friend Amanda(I have like 8 friends named Amanda, but one of them, just not the Amanda from Masterchef who I think…

Japanese Onion Soup

I came up with this because I needed to use up a lot of breadcrumbs, and one of the first things I thought about was doing a take on a French onion soup. Mostly because a few years ago on Masterchef season 10, my plating bestie Bri made one for a bread challenge, that while…

Pumpkin Toast with Koji Mascarpone

This is one of those rare instances where all of the ingredients for this recipe happened to be all there in my refrigerator already. I had leftover pumpkin from making a cake with it, I had bread from a failed milk bread sandwich attempt, and I had both heavy cream and koji as my usual…

Classic Pan Con Tomate

I love pan con tomate. I had it for the first time in Jaleo in Washington, D.C., and it was such a simple concept – crusty, airy bread, rubbed with raw garlic, garnished with juicy, crushed tomatoes, olive oil, and sea salt. So straightforward in the components, and honestly very refreshing and light! The perfect…

Strawberry-Tonka-Mascarpone Sando’s

If you thought this recipe was going to be premade bread, premade mascarpone cheese, and fresh strawberries, you would be only 1/3 right there. I was inspired to do this from my trip to Japan(which honestly inspired a LOT of new recipes for me). I got some strawberry sando’s from Tokyo Station on my Shinkansen…

Scallion-Sausage Roll Epis

I’m sure for a lot of you, your first question when reading this recipe post would be “what’s an epis?”. An epi, epis being the plural form, is a kind of bread loaf that where the dough is initially shaped like a baguette, but is then snipped and fanned out to sort of look like…

Kinako-PB&J Brioches

These brioches came about because I wanted to make something with the peanut butter and strawberries I had lying around, and the first obvious choice was to do a PB&J. Peanut butter and jelly is such a nostalgic concept, since so many people(at least in the States) have grown up eating these at some point…

Sticky Toffee “Cinnabon” Loaves

One of my personal favorite memories during filming Masterchef: Back to Win was when a bunch of us(i.e. Gabriel, Samantha, Dara, and I) ordered Cinnabon to where we were staying, and we just ate Cinnabon while trying not to feel stressed about the competition(before anyone asks, Bri had an appointment when that happened, or else…