Flourless Chocolate Cakes

A little earlier this year, I was tinkering around with a flourless chocolate cake recipe. Fast-forward a few months, and I was trying to think of a fun way to make a chocolate fondant-like situation. I envisioned this dainty but tall chocolate cake, similar to a molten lava cake, but firmer. I wanted this to…

Chocolate-Peanut Butter Ripple Cake

If you are looking for pure decadence, look no further than this cake(assuming you don’t have a nut allergy; if you do, sub the peanut butter and peanuts in this recipe with Biscoff and cookie butter?). I grew up loving Butterfingers and Reeses, both of which are peanut-based candy bars. Chocolate and peanut butter is…

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…

Chocolate-Milky Oolong Cake

Milk or milky oolong has been one of my obsessions ever since I got some from a cute tea shop in Munich. I’m partially ashamed to admit that I never heard of the tea prior to that trip, especially since it is a Taiwanese tea, and I am Taiwan-born after all, but better late than…

Chocolate Decadence Layer Cake

I am a firm believer that there is a chocolate cake for every occasion. The best occasion for this kind of recipe is if you want a chocolate cake that tastes like baked fudge. Now I have been mentioning the Ms. Trunchbull Chocolate cake a bunch of times on this blog, but this is very,…

Midnight Snack: a petit gateau

I was craving a Hostess cake, and that literally was what inspired me making these. I specifically wanted a chocolate cake stuffed with a marshmallow, with a chocolate ganache glaze. So I figured, especially since I had a lot of spare egg whites lying around, that I could use one of the egg whites to…

Chocolate Olive Oil Cakes

Olive oil cake is one of those kinds of cakes that you are starting to see more and more of recently. Almost every cafe in Los Angeles sells an olive oil cake, or some variation on one. However, I don’t really see chocolate-olive oil cakes often – funnily enough, olive oil gelato with chocolate and…

Assam-Chocolate Layer Cake

This cake is kind of a callback to another chocolate-Assam recipe I made years ago. Unlike the other version, this one features a whipped Assam tea ganache buttercream coupled with a fudgier, denser chocolate cake. I was inspired by the salted caramel chocolate cake I had at Republique, which was rich and almost brownie-like in…

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…

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…

Chocolate-Cajeta Cupcakes

These cupcakes are meant to represent decadence and indulgence. One of my personal favorite combinations is dark chocolate with salted caramel, and these cupcakes take that combination, and really drive it home. In place of using just a regular caramel, I went with Cajeta. Cajeta is a Oaxacan goat milk caramel, very similar to dulce…

Uber Fluffy Chocolate Layer Cake

This chocolate cake is the intersection of everything I could possibly want from a chocolate cake. The sponge is somehow both fudgy and rich, but light and springy with this almost honeycomb-like crumb structure that could only be achieved by whipping the living hell out of egg whites, and adding in just the right amount…

Olive oil-chocolate bundt cakes

This recipe is really my idea of what some hipstery cafe in Silverlake would serve. Not saying that in a mean or even malicious way, since I am guilty of going to said hipstery cafes in Silverlake with my friends from time to time. Olive oil cake has been trending up a lot in LA…

Chocolate-Coffee Layer cake

This cake is basically a chocolate and coffee lover’s dream. Layers of dark chocolate cake with an Ovaltine latte soak, whipped chocolate ganache, a chocolate cookie crumb, cocoa-coffee French buttercream, and coffee tuiles. With each layer, I wanted to make sure they all brought different forms or textures of chocolate or coffee. We have the…

Vegan Devil’s food cake with Biscoff and sesame

This cake was loosely inspired by the EatDomi chocolate, salted caramel, and sesame cake. I wanted to make it vegan, as it was a birthday cake order for a friend of a friend, and that person’s boyfriend was vegan. Yeah, I know, that was a really long string of words there. Anyways, while I could…

Vegan and Gluten-free Devil’s Food Cake

I came up with the idea to make this cake because I wanted to make my vegan chocolate-tofu mousse again, but also wanted to pair it with something that would compliment it perfectly, so I figured, why not chocolate mousse on chocolate cake? For the cake itself, I went with my gluten-free and vegan devil’s…

Chocolate covered banana roll cake

Whenever I think of quintessential beach treats, chocolate-covered bananas always come to mind. Mostly because of Arrested Development. I love the idea of taking nostalgic things like that, and recreating them in something more in my style. In this case, that would be a roll cake. Using a fluffy chocolate chiffon, blonde chocolate, and Korean…

Tangerine and chocolate “snack cakes”

These were kind of my ode to a Hostess cupcake. A dark chocolate cake with a cream inside and ganache on top. Fudgy, delicious, and definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. For this rendition, I went with a chocolate cake that uses black cacao, which has this almost fruity quality to it from being an…