I’ve made it a point to make hanami desserts every single year, so I definitely did not want to stop that trend this year. Hana-mi refers to flower viewing, specifically the viewing of cherry blossoms blooming every spring. As a whole, this is meant to symbolize the beginning of a new year, or at least…
Tag: dango
Snow Bunny Dango
Inspiration was from Paper Mario, and Super Paper Mario, where there was an item called the Snow Bunny. From how they looked, a Snow Bunny resembled an usagi manju, which is a Japanese bun shaped like a rabbit. These manju are quite cute, usually being made with mochi, although I have seen baked varieties as…
Polar Bear Shaved Ice
During my most recent trip to Oahu, I had the fortune of being able to go to Matsumoto Shaved Ice! I’ve been wanting to go since I was about 8 years old, so it was create to finally go and experience it! What makes Matsumoto so special is that they use a lot of Japanese…
Pearl in Hiding: a plated dish
So this was one of the five dishes I made for my “Namie” pop-up dinner during the summer for my friends from 4Foodie(special shoutout to Kate and Victoria for the amazing photos from this!). Originally, it was just going to be three dishes, but I extended it to five, and this was a super last-minute(two…
Purple passionfruit mochi truffles
I’ve done mochi truffles in the past, and these were some that I wanted to do, featuring passionfruit! The interior is passionfruit liquid core with a passionfruit mousse, while the exterior is a super soft mochi made with shiratamako, dyed purple naturally using acai powder, just to mimic the color and appearance of a passionfruit….
Calpico Kakigoori(shaved ice)
This is literally the simplest recipe I have put up in a while. Mostly because it was inspired by several aspects of my earlier childhood, better known as a time before I got into cooking(I literally only started to cook/bake when I was 15 onwards). I have a lot of fond memories drinking Calpico water…
Rainbow dango(suama)
So I was brainstorming different rainbow desserts for Pride this year, and I literally came up with the idea to do these when I was walking through my local Japanese grocery store(which I frequent a lot these days), and stumbled upon Fugetsu-Do‘s rainbow dango, also called suama. For those unfamiliar, Fugetsu-Do is a highly popular…
Dango with black rice pudding and salted rice milk
I love mango sticky rice. The stewed down rice with salty coconut milk and juicy mango, it’s a fun combination to play around with. For this particular recipe, I wanted to accentuate that classic Asian dessert by doing rice three ways, and mango two ways. For the rice, I used black rice and did a…
Kabosu dango
So I had no idea what kabosu was until the end of 2020, when I was at a Japanese grocery store, and I found a bottle of kabosu juice. Looking at it, I thought it was like the Filipino citrus calamansi, based on the green exterior and bright yellow interior. But researching into it more,…
Fireflies in the night: a plated dessert
So when I first acquired pandan-buko extract, I had to play around with it a ton, since I had very little familiarity with it. Upon testing it with dango, I found out that it turns things green because of how strong of a green coloring that extract had. So I wanted to capitalize on that,…
Feelings of make-pretend: a plated dessert
I came up with this dessert half out of needing to get rid of my leftover vegan macaron components, and half because I just wanted to do something playful and elegant. With what I already had made, being the ice cream and the gelee, I was able to come up with a couple different ideas,…
koi no tsubomi: elderflower-citrus anmitsu
This was a dessert inspired by Koda Kumi’s song of the same name; the meaning of it in Japanese literally translates to blossoms of love. When I first heard the song, it was from the Driving Hits 7 soundtrack, so it was remixed and sounded really foreboding and intense. I didn’t quite like it. But…
Freddy's Harajuku 