Brown Butter Toffee Chip Cookies

I occasionally love to dabble and adjust my cookie recipe, because I love how tweaking an ingredient or a technique in the recipe can result in dramatically different kinds of cookies. In the case of these cookies, I was trying to go with this super toasty, brown butter-forward cookie studded with chocolate, cacao nibs, and…

Lilikoi Chantilly Cake

Contrary to what you may think, “chantilly” is a term for two different pastry components. The classic French version is just a sweetened whipped cream. However, in Hawaii, it means something a bit different. I was surprised a few years ago when I was in Oahu with my friend Lauren that she introduced me to…

Fudgemallow Naked Cake

In a lot of ways, this cake is an homage to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Specifically, the chocolate bar that Charlie found the golden ticket in, which was a “Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight”. Now, I have never eaten a Wonka bar in my life. I always wanted to, and that actually may be a future project…

Hot Chocolate-Stretchy Ice Cream Sundae

Even though I’m posting this recipe in January, I wanted to take hot chocolate, and turn it into something more California-friendly. Because let’s be real here, Southern California has two seasons: warm and slightly less warm. I personally love drinking hot chocolate in the winter – when I went to college in Boston, doing to…

Chocolate and Cacao Chip Shortbreads

Back in college, I wanted to do a fun take on cookies and cream, and so I made a panna cotta with chocolate chip shortbreads. The shortbreads themselves were buttery and light, but the chocolate actually had this very enjoyable crunch to it after a batch of them had to sit through the cold Boston…

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…

Chocolate Silk Pie

Now a lot of people might have fond memories of Southern chocolate silk pie. For me, it’s another way to consume more chocolate. That’s really it. I might have had it growing up and going to Marie Calendar’s, but honestly all I can remember from Marie Calendar’s was getting the Banana Meringue Pie, which was…

Ruby Forest Petit Gateau

This is an homage to the black forest cake, which was my birthday cake for the first 14 years of my life. The reason why we would eat black forest cake was because we would celebrate my birthday in Taiwan, and the bakery in the Shida district where we would stay/live only made one kind…

Diglett Rocky Road Doughnuts

When I think back to Generation 1 of Pokémon, one of the funniest designs for me is Diglett. It’s supposed to be like a living whack-a-mole situation, and it looks like a brown bump with eyes, a pink nose-mouth-thing, and it is just sticking out of the ground. It apparently has legs and an actual…

Dijonnaise de Chocolat

So this is probably the most random thing to admit to, but I grew up on shoujou anime(aka CardCaptor Sakura, a pinch of Sailor Moon, and Mirumo De Pon to name the main ones I watched), and there was an anime I was exposed to called “Yumeiro Patissiere”, which was a baking anime. I had…

Nutella-Cold Brew Cake

I made this cake mostly because I wanted to create a chocolate-forward cake. That and I wanted it to be a little playful and sophisticated, using black(Dutch-processed) cacao to add a fruitier cocoa flavor, as well as cold brew to intensify the chocolate flavor, and Nutella, because why not? Nutella makes everything better, unless you…

Chocolate-Hazelnut Hot Milk Hedgehogs

A while back, I posted a recipe on making these cute little Mont Blanc hedgehogs. So, I wanted to revisit that, now that I have discovered the beauty that is edible paint, and I wanted to make this chocolate and hazelnut version! Whenever I think of chocolate and hazelnut together, I remember when my sister…

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….

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…

Chocolate-raspberry-rose tarts

I literally only came up with these because I had a coworker who was putting in her two-weeks, and I wanted to thank her properly for all of the hard work she had done! She specifically requested chocolate and raspberry, and I just happened to have made a batch of raspberry-rose jam, so I wanted…

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…