Elderflower PiƱka Colada Cake

This recipe was originally going to be a ginger-white peach cake, but I couldn’t find white peaches, so I had to make substitutions. The peaches weren’t available, but the grocery store did have pink pineapple, so I made an impulse buy, and grabbed the pink pineapple instead. I’m personally surprised that pink pineapples were more…

Black Sesame and Strawberry Lemonade Cookie Sandwiches

This recipe is a slight homage to a PB&J sandwich, but in cookie form. I have recently been obsessed with Sanritsu sandwich cookies(imagine two tuiles sandwiching a pleasantly sweet creamy filling), and wanted to try making a rendition of them. Instead of doing a buttercream or ganache, since I had leftover strawberry puree and a…

Peach Bellini Pate Choux

These pate choux, in a lot of ways, are an homage to my Masterchef bestie, Bri. Peaches just because her family has a peach orchard in Texas, prosecco because I know she loves her sparkling wines(fun fact, a bellini is a drink made from peaches and prosecco), and the usage of molecular caviar as it…

Blackberry Blood Orange Sunset Cake

Back in high school, my “signature” cupcake was a blue velvet cake with orange curd, blackberry Italian meringue buttercream, and white chocolate “stems”, with the entire cupcake designed to resemble a flower with the shades of an oceanside sunset. It was inspired specifically by the oceanside sunsets that I would see growing up in a…

Scattered wind chime: a plated dessert

So this was my first dessert where I attempted to use isomalt for blown sugar. I was trying to redo a dessert I made years ago, but using some more interesting technique. The base of the dessert is a blackberry-yuzu posset, while we also have matcha crumble, blackberry-yuzu gelee, yuzu curd, and the isomalt to…

Ube, mango, and pandan layer cake

So I actually made this cake as an order for one of my closest friends’ boyfriend’s birthday! She requested it to have ube since he’s Filipino, and he loves the color purple. So I went with an ube cake with a mango-lime pudding layer, as well as a pandan-buko French buttercream, and ube crumble as…

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…

Fantome: a plated dish

So this was a concept I had in my back pocket since the summer, but just never got around to making until recently. I love blood orange and I love scallop, and I wanted to do an Asian fusion take on it with elements of French, Chinese, and Japanese cuisines. The one issue I always…

STEP: a plated dessert

I have been listening to a ton of ClariS again recently. ClariS is a Japanese pop group consisting of two girls who sing extremely girly songs that make me question my own gender identity. That being said, I do appreciate how dessert-friendly their songs and aesthetic are, and it makes it a lot easier for…

Charlotte the fool: a layer cake

For this cake, I just really wanted to come up with a concept that fused multiple desserts into one. That included the charlotte cake, being a layer cake surrounded with ladyfingers, and fool, which is a cream that has puree folded through it, and I also technically made an icebox cake as well, since that…

Fruitcake with citrus curd glaze

Continuing on my festive holiday baking spree, I wanted to create yet another classic, being fruitcake. Now, I’ve never made fruitcake before, nor have I ever even eaten one. I have seen them on TV and I recall these dense, molasses-y cakes embedded with a ton of fruit in them. So I went with that…

Oeuf Wiedersehen: a plated concept

I was inspired by the Harmonicblend song, Auf Wiedersehen, which is German for “goodbye”, when it was coming up with this concept. I wanted to do a pun off of that, using oeuf, the French word for egg, and that’s when I decided that I needed to do a snow egg, or a poached meringue….

Passion fruit-coconut-caramel naked layer cake

I literally only made this cake because we had about 15 passion fruits lying around and I needed to start getting rid of them before they went bad. The cake itself has five different layers to it, being coconut-brown sugar cake, salted coconut caramel soaking liquid, coconut cream, passionfruit curd, and coconut crumble. I think…

Mikan-fennel-elderflower chiffon doughnuts

Unlike previous doughnut cream articles that I have written, this is a much more simplified dessert. Mostly for two reasons: 1., I didn’t have time to make proper doughnut creams of these flavor profiles since I was making these on a Thursday for a Friday meeting and 2. doughnut creams take one full day to…

Blueberry dreams: a plated concept

This dessert came about when I was watching a shoujo anime, “Kobato” and I was inspired by a character named Ioryogi, being this outwardly cute blue dog creature, and his love of baumkuchen, a circular German layered cake that resembles the rings or layers of a tree. Normally, baumkuchen is made on a spit roast…