I wanted to create a dessert inspired by my childhood favorite, cookies and cream. However, I didn’t want to just serve that. I have done cookies and cream inspired desserts in the past, but this time around, I wanted to play around with milk jam. For my milk jam recipe, I love using cornstarch, xantham…
Tag: dessert
Miso chocolate cake with soy milk-black tea ice cream, sesame, and azuki jam
The inspiration for this dessert was Chinese New Years. The idea of a festive dish that embodies a lot of traditionally Asian flavors, namely the red beans and sesame. Red bean soup with black sesame-mochi balls is a traditional Chinese dessert, so this is a definite homage to that. The miso-chocolate cake really plays off…
Duo of mini dorayaki
I love dorayaki. A pancake sandwich, typically stuffed with red bean paste. Coming from a much more Westernized background (putting it politely, whereas the more accurate way of saying it is that I was raised in Torrance, therefore was bleached of cultural appreciation), I love stuffing my own dorayaki with fillings other than the traditional…
Strawberry-Angel Food Shortcake Doughnut Creams
The goal behind this dessert was to make a strawberry cake unlike any that I have made before. I love making doughnut creams, so I wanted to make another flavor. This time, it’s a strawberry angel food shortcake. I used angel food cake as the base, because it is super light and airy, being made…
Salted Caramel Devil’s Food Cake
The first time I ever had a cake presented to me in such a fashion was at Hinoki and the Bird. I wanted to recreate that same Devil’s Food Cake for years, and now I’ve finally done…. after they had already removed it from their menu. Oh well, at least it’s mine, and only mine….
Cutie Honey Raspberry Cake
I wanted to prepare a dessert that I could enjoy with a cup of tea while staring out into the city, quietly judging everyone. For some reason, I like to do that. I don’t know why. I guess being an 100% Judging type per Myers-Briggs does that for you. But being a judgmental bitch aside,…
Citron Othello: black and white lemon mousse cake
The idea behind this cake came from a very unusual silicon mold I purchased from Amazon. I knew that just from the triangular prism shape of the final cake, that each slice would be a little tear drop-triangle-chestnut-looking thing. I thought it would be cute if I made some mousse cakes that were visual plays…
Chocolate-Tangerine Creamsicle Cake
I love chocolate cake. I cannot stress or repeat it enough. But one of my favorite chocolate cake recipes is my fluffy fudge cake, which is made using bloomed cocoa powder, melted chocolate, and meringue, just to give the cake a dense, fudge-y start and a light, airy finish. Because yes, some cakes can have…
Strawberry cheesecake tiramisu
This dessert is an oldie but a goodie for me. Tiramisu is an Italian classic, typically made with whipped mascarpone cheese and coffee-amaretto soaked ladyfingers, topped with cocoa powder. The coffee and alcohol are there to give you a little “pick me up”, but I wanted to have that same effect with just strawberries. For…
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…
Golden Milk-Tofu Ice Cream with Activated Charcoal-Tofu “Sugar” Cone
I only ever heard about golden milk when I went with my sister to Pressed Juicery and was introduced to a sample shot of it there. I heard that it had a lot of great health benefits, including boosting your immune system, clarifying your skin, blood purifying, being a liver tonic, having anticancer properties, and…
Sweet potato mont blanc
Mont blanc is traditionally a French dessert, featuring a puree of chestnut piped over whipped cream and topped with powdered sugar to resemble a snow-capped mountain; fun fact, mont blanc is French for white mountain. This dessert is popular in both France and Japan, and other varieties use sweet potatoes, shiro an or azuki beans…
Multilayered Chocolate-Raspberry Tart
This dessert was everything that the chocolate-raspberry meringue tart was supposed to be. Chocolate on raspberry on chocolate with no other interference. While the recipe would have conceptually remained the same, I changed it up, using nama chocolate as the base, raspberry gelee as a disk instead, fresh raspberries, a chocolate cremeaux, a tempered chocolate…
Banana-salted caramel doughnut creams
I’ve finally settled on calling the doughnut entremet-things doughnut creams, mostly because it’s a lot easier to say. For this recipe, I opted for banana and salted caramel, nuanced with brown butter and walnuts. The layers for this cake are a brown butter-banana-nut cake, salted caramel bavarian cream, caramelized mirror glaze, salted caramel, and bruleed…
Christmas is dawning: a plated dessert
The concept for this dessert originally came from watching The Next Iron Chef: Superchefs, all the way back in 2011. Chef Elizabeth Falkner created this really cool chocolate devil’s food cake with peppermint snow, inspired by Christmas, and I wanted to do something that was a nod to that, since I finally have the tapioca…
Raspberry and Frangipane Tart
Challenging yourself is fun…from time to time. For me, a challenge is doing something that practices technique, and hinges on perfect execution so that you cannot hide behind the bells and whistles that you should all know that I am capable and comfortable with doing. Granted, a tart is not hard. They just take a…
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…
Honey-craisin cotton cheesecake
The idea of doing a cotton cheesecake came from when I visited my friend, Lauren, and we were trying to make these for her menu at LimeRed, in Boston. I tried to make a cream cheese chiffon cake, hoping that it would work instead of a cotton cheesecake, something she struggled greatly with making, but…
Black sesame-matcha cheesecake doughnut cream
I came across the inspiration for this concept on Instagram, where I saw a chef make a double decker cake doughnut that was pressed into a mousse then glazed in a mirror glaze. I believe it was called a tiger doughnut, because of the pattern on it. For my own version of it, I decided…
Nama-Choco Pops
These came about from one drive home from work when I was thinking about innovative or new dessert ideas. One that came to mind was the idea of lollipops, thanks to a song of the same name by Koda Kumi. A lollipop-up dessert concept, where I would serve different flavored treats on sticks. Back when…
Freddy's Harajuku 