Cajeta-misugaru banoffee pie

I’ve made cajeta desserts, and I’ve done misugaru banana pudding desserts, and I’ve made banoffee pie desserts too. So I figured, why not combine all three? I mean for Pi Day, it just made the most sense to go with a pie that is an amalgamation of both banana pudding(custard, cream, wafers, and bananas) and…

Matcha and cream roll cake

So I actually made this cake for my mom’s birthday, but I figured that the green color just made it perfect for St. Patrick’s and March, so I held off on posting it until then. The unique thing about this roll cake compared to other ones I have done in the past is that the…

Dadar gulung mille crepe(pandan and coconut)

So a lot of Asians grew up on pandan, but truthfully, I never did. I always hear people saying that it’s the “vanilla of Asia”, which I might call blatant B.S. to, because I did not grow up on anything with pandan at all. And before the pandemic, I never even had anything with pandan…

Chocolate-chestnut-matcha entremet

I was mostly inspired to make this because I wanted to make a really woody and vibrant-green dessert. Mostly because with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I had to get together as many green, Irish, beer, or gold-themed dessert ideas together as possible. So this would be one of them. For my components, we have…

Vegan Milkbar Birthday Cake

So I did a rendition on this particular Milkbar cake years ago(ironically before I even worked at Milkbar). But I wanted to do a more true version of the original cake, this time making it 100% vegan. The beauty of it is that you cannot even tell that the cake is vegan! It looks exactly…

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…

True Kinda Love: a plated dessert

I really just wanted to try something fun with this dessert, especially since I adore using ruby chocolate. So I went with a ruby chocolate mousse, ruby chocolate crunch disk, a raspberry-champagne gelee-core, and a ruby chocolate ganache with tempered white chocolate wings. I named the dessert “True Kinda Love” as a Steven Universe reference,…

Raspberry red velvet doughnut creams

I feel like the hallmark to a great baker is how they approach the simpler things. For me, whenever I order multiple cupcakes from a bakery, one flavor is always red velvet. The simple reason is because with red velvet, there are a few criteria that need to be met: the cake must be red,…

Yakudo: a plated dessert

With this dessert, I wanted to just focus in on two flavors: chocolate and passionfruit. I really love the contrast between dark and bitter and bright and tart, so putting the two together just made perfect sense. For my components, we have a dark pate choux with passionfruit inspiration namelaka, dark chocolate mousse, dark chocolate…

Chocolate and kinako blanc manger

This was honestly one of the simplest desserts I have made in a while. Mostly because I made it to get rid of some spare ingredients I had lying around. I love blanc manger, which is a set milk-based mousse, similar to panna cotta. The key difference is that blanc manger uses starch to set…

Coconut-chocolate-caramel cake

In a lot of ways, this cake is almost a German chocolate cake, and almond an Almond Joy cake. If I swapped the macadamia nuts with pecans, it’s basically German chocolate. If I omitted the caramel and swapped the macadamia for almonds, we have Almond Joy. This cake features chocolate, coconut, macadamia nuts, and salted…

Blueberry pie doughnut creams

I feel like I haven’t been baking a ton of doughnut creams lately, and I LOVE making doughnut creams…for the most part. They consist of a baked cake, a set mousse, a mirror glaze, and at least one or two cute or unique toppings. The reason I tend not to make them often is because…

Tsuki no Hikari wagashi

I really came up with this dessert because I was inspired by snow globes initially. I wanted to make this pretty snow globe wagashi situation, and that was what this would have been originally. But on the night I was making it, I looked up and saw a full moon peeking out of the clouds,…

Dulcey-piña colada cake

So I made this cake for my friend, Carolyn, specifically on her birthday. She was hardcore craving a “toasty, tropically flavored” cake, and she literally gave me a list of what she wanted. She wanted a coconut cake with crunchy macadamia nuts, something with pineapple, but it had to be cooked, toasted coconut, and something…

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,…

Sunburst: a plated dessert

I named this dessert ‘Sunburst’ after a Tobu and Itro song that came out a while ago of the same name. And also for my Chinese namesake, which translates to Winter Morning Sun. I had to use sesame since it is a favorite ingredient of mine, and I paired it with sea buckthorn to add…

New Rules: a plated dessert

For me, this dessert was all about trying a couple of new things. Using gjetost cheese in a fonduta was a new idea, and playing around with more savory things like carrots and pairing that with mugicha, which is a barley tea. I also featured yuzu in this dessert as well, since the sort of…

Keep on keeping on: a roll cake

I have wanted to make a vertical roll cake again for quite a while. They’re a lot of fun because visually, they resemble trees! Whenever I think about Christmas, I obviously have to think of yule logs or bouche de noels. Those are roll cakes that are decorated to look like a freshly cut log….