Eevee is my absolute favorite Pokemon. I just love a Pokemon that can become anything it wants when it grows up. Eevee can become a mermaid, a bolt of electricity, a living icicle, or even cover itself with ribbons! I adore all of the Eeveelutions(Umbreon is my favorite though), but Eevee itself just has a…
Tag: coffee
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…
Cafe de Olla Naked Cake
This cake is an homage to my friend, Frances. When we used to work together, our morning ritual was going to our workplace cafeteria, getting coffee and toast, and dicking around instead of doing actual work enjoying a mini breakfast together at our desks. In honor of her graduating college, I had to make a…
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…
Rippled hazelnut and coffee brownies
These brownies came about because I was really craving something crunchy, fudgey, and rich. I had quite a bit of leftover ingredients and prep from a variety of other recipes I had made, and I kind of wanted to find a productive way to use them all. And that was really how these brownies came…
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…
“Tiramisu” cookies
I always wanted to do a take on a ricotta cookie, but I was never quite sure what direction to go with them beyond that. The idea of putting a soft cheese into a cookie dough was intriguing , just because I was always curious how that would affect a cookie’s consistency over using butter…
Tiramisu wedding cake
So this (not so little) cake was actually my first wedding cake order! I usually don’t do wedding cakes, since they take forever to make and the stress of delivering these while keeping them intact is a lot to handle, but I was asked by my friend Lily to do it for our mutual friend…
Chrysalis: a plated dessert
During my senior year of college, I made a plated dessert called “Sanagi” – sanagi is the Japanese word for chrysalis, or cocoon. The dessert itself was matcha pate choux with spun sugar, made to resemble a little caterpillar crawling into a cocoon, hence the name of the dessert. I wanted to do a more…
Goodnight, Meteorite: a plated dessert
So I actually made a dessert years ago, though realistically most of you wouldn’t know that because this was pre-Masterchef, aka the period of time where legit nobody really knew about me, named Goodnight, Meteor. That dessert featured coffee, chocolate, and cookies. So I wanted to take that, and redo it in a cooler format….
Black cacao tiramisu: a petit gateau
The first time I ever worked with black cacao was actually at Milkbar, when I had some downtime to test whatever I wanted. I stumbled upon a small container of black cacao powder, and I was really curious. I opened it, sniffed it a little, and it had this earthy, but fragrant aroma. It was…
Cafe de olla cake
When I was doing research on Latin cuisine, I came across an interesting beverage called cafe de olla. It is an earthy coffee drink with spices, namely cinnamon, anise, and clove, sometimes orange, in it that is normally served in a clay cup. It sounded like a lot of beautiful flavors, to be honest, and…
Gomakashi: a plated dessert
When I was coming up with this dessert, I had already made a black sesame flan in advanced, but didn’t necessarily know what else to pair it with. Luckily, my friend Ellen had just reached out to me, suggesting I make a dessert using dalgona coffee. Dalgona coffee, which has been recently been popularized on…
LAUSD Crumb Cake Doughnut Creams
These came about because I wanted to make something for my new coworker, Georgina. She was talking a lot about this coffee cake she had going to school in the LA Unified School District and I legitimately had no clue what she as talking about. So I looked it up and it was like a…
Kabocha flan with kabocha friands
This dessert has been on my to-do list since the summer. I am obsessed with flan, it being the first dessert I ever learned how to make, and I’ve been meaning to do something with kabocha squash, but I wanted to wait until it was the fall to do so. For this dessert, it’s a…
Vegan Oreo cake with vegan Swiss meringue buttercream
This dessert was a simple one, but it’s a simple win as well! To hear the phrase “vegan Swiss meringue buttercream” already gets me excited, because meringue buttercreams were one of the reasons why I had to stop baking vegan, as I thought that they were impossible to do! But with the help of aquafaba(canned…
Gateau Opera
So Gateau Opera is one of those desserts that I have read a lot about, but never really bothered to try making on my own. I have made the sponge, jaconde, before, and obviously, I have made ganache before. But the other filling, which is a coffee infused French buttercream, not so much. For those…
Gluten-free mocha almond fudge cupcakes
Continuing from my semi-replication of Chloe Coscarelli’s cupcakes, I wanted to make a mocha almond fudge cupcake but rather than making it vegan, I wanted to make it gluten-free. The main reason why is because I wanted to make the cupcake using almond flour, to really hammer in the almond flavor into the cupcake. The…
Chocolate bombolini cake
This dessert came about because I had a shit ton of ricotta cheese leftover, and I needed to use it. I wound up making cannoli cream, which is made with heavily whipped ricotta and chocolate chips. I figured that it would be the easiest way to use the ricotta, since I was not about to…
Chocolate-bourbon-coffee cake
I dub this cake my “adulting” cake because it consists of two things I often need or want in my life: coffee and booze. I also made the cake look really drab and compact, to symbolize how being an adult is not as wonderful and exciting as people would expect. It’s honestly boring. Is that…