I feel like almost any American can recall a time in their lives when they go to a birthday party and are presented with plain vanilla cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles, either baked into the cake, or speckled on top of a vanilla or chocolate frosting. It is honestly such a basic thing, cake, frosting, sprinkles,…
Tag: dessert
Chocolate Decadence Layer Cake
I am a firm believer that there is a chocolate cake for every occasion. The best occasion for this kind of recipe is if you want a chocolate cake that tastes like baked fudge. Now I have been mentioning the Ms. Trunchbull Chocolate cake a bunch of times on this blog, but this is very,…
Chocolate-Miso-Apple Tart
This recipe was inspired by an old episode of the Japanese Iron Chef, where the challenge was to make desserts with apples and chocolate. I love the idea of combining chocolate, something sweet, bitter, and creamy, with apples, which can take on a lot of spice, bitterness, and are naturally sweet and tart. I just…
Strawberry-Soy Milk Phyllo Pie
This phyllo pie is a variation on the apricot one I made a bit ago, this one featuring flaky homemade phyllo, Strawberry Inspiration coating, soy milk custard, strawberry gelee, and glazed strawberries on top. I have really fallen in love with the flaky phyllo fruit pies, because the filling is so interchangeable, as is the…
Mamey and Thai Tea Popsicles
I am personally quite surprised that I have not made popsicles since 2022, nor have I worked with mamey sapote since 2020! It has been a minute since I last utilized my popsicle molds, and since I wanted to make a mamey dessert, it just all fell into place to make these mamey popsicles! In…
Oreo Mille Crepe Cake
I have been wanting to make this specific recipe since May of 2023. But back then, I was still on a two-month sugar fast, and I learned very quickly that May is an exhausting month to try to do anything – between Mother’s Day and my dad’s birthday, there’s already a lot of cakes that…
Midnight Snack: a petit gateau
I was craving a Hostess cake, and that literally was what inspired me making these. I specifically wanted a chocolate cake stuffed with a marshmallow, with a chocolate ganache glaze. So I figured, especially since I had a lot of spare egg whites lying around, that I could use one of the egg whites to…
Chocolate Olive Oil Cakes
Olive oil cake is one of those kinds of cakes that you are starting to see more and more of recently. Almost every cafe in Los Angeles sells an olive oil cake, or some variation on one. However, I don’t really see chocolate-olive oil cakes often – funnily enough, olive oil gelato with chocolate and…
Seaweed Ice Cream Sundae
Before anyone thinks that adding seaweed to desserts is weird, I actually grew up eating this Chinese coconut tapioca dessert that had pieces of rehydrated kombu in it. The kombu, which is a type of dried Japanese seaweed that is used in broths, absorbed the sweet coconut flavor and added a nice textural contrast to…
Mt. Pav-lava with Dinosaur Shortbreads
My friend Samantha(from season 9 and Back to Win) gifted me with these dinosaur cookie cutters back in January, but truthfully, I had zero ideas on what to do with these. I am not a major dinosaur enthusiast(I never even watched Jurassic Park, though I DID grow up on The Land Before Time rip Little…
Mint Chip Gelato Sundae
Mint chip ice cream is hilariously enough, my earliest memory. My mom, when we first immigrated to America, would take me and my sister to the Baskin Robbins nearby where we lived in Torrance(hilariously, that Baskin Robbins is STILL in business to this day, I now as an adult live walking distance from there, and…
Biscoff-Hazelnut-Brown Butter Cake
Back when I went to Berlin last December, one tasty little morsel we bought as a souvenir were these German hazelnut praline candies called “Toffiffee”. They were fun to stay out loud, a nightmare to type out, and were these caramel-nougat candies that contain chocolate and hazelnut. So in other words, delicious. However, we bought…
Blueberry-Lemon Cheesecake Entremet
So I have already made a blueberry cheesecake or two in the past for this blog, but I wanted to do a cheesecake mousse cake-entremet kind of thing using a blueberry-lemon cheesecake as the body of the dessert, with a blueberry gelee and a lemon curd interior, as well as a blueberry chiffon cake base….
Hummingbird Cake with Miso Caramel and Ginger Cream Cheese Ganache
I first remember hearing about hummingbird cake when I was watching an episode of Cupcake Wars, where it was mentioned as a Southern wedding cake that featured bananas, pecans, sometimes coconut or pineapple, and a cream cheese frosting. It sounded like a banana-nut muffin, but with frosting, if we are being honest here. Not that…
Lemon Marshmallow Rainbow Tart
I will admit, I procrastinated with my Pride dessert this year. Namely because I was almost not going to do one at all for 2024. I have made many a Pride dessert in the past, and while they were all tons of fun to conceptualize and admire after making them, the actual assembly of each…
Lemon-Haupia Chiffon Cake
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, lemon curd, lemon cake, and a lot of other lemon things, especially when life(your parents) gift you with 20 larger than life lemons to work with. This recipe was my way to use up a decent portion of them(I want to say about 4 lemons were used…
Assam-Chocolate Layer Cake
This cake is kind of a callback to another chocolate-Assam recipe I made years ago. Unlike the other version, this one features a whipped Assam tea ganache buttercream coupled with a fudgier, denser chocolate cake. I was inspired by the salted caramel chocolate cake I had at Republique, which was rich and almost brownie-like in…
Almond Tofu-Apricot Phyllo Pie
There are those moments where I have a culinary brain child that just hits on every single level of deliciousness and nostalgia, and this pie is 1000% that kind of recipe. Almond tofu is a popular Chinese dessert, made from Chinese almond powder(made from apricot kernels – it tastes exactly like almond extract, which does…
P.O.G. “Pearl”: a Petit Gateau
These little pearls were inspired by a recent trip to Hawaii(yes, I have been to Oahu 4 times in the past 3 years, I am addicted. Well, that and I have a bunch of friends who live there – shout out to Ann and Lauren – so Waikiki along with Austin have been two places…
Mini Osmanthus and Peach Pies
This recipe came about because I saw peaches in the grocery store, remembered that peaches were in season, grabbed a bunch, and then realized that I actually needed to do something with said purchased peaches. The first thing that came to mind was doing this large peach pie with a pretty lattice on top, and…
Freddy's Harajuku 