So I was watching the latest season of Top Chef with my friend Amanda, and a contestant named Monique made this really intriguing Filipino dessert called biko. Biko is a Filipino sticky rice cake made with caramelized coconut milk and brown sugar, just to give it this super hearty and rich texture and flavor. As…
Tag: gluten free
Vegan and gluten-free pecan praline brownie sundae
I came up with this recipe because I wanted to see how challenging it would be to make a dessert that is both gluten-free and vegan. I wanted to take the most decadent, self-indulgent dessert, being a brownie sundae, and make it 100% free of animal products and gluten. Truthfully, making a vegan and gluten-free…
Vietnamese Coffee Sticky Buns
There are two beautiful things about being on a diet. The first is obviously that you lose weight and in a healthier way. The second is that you continuously develop cravings for things you know you should not be eating, and that is a wonderful basis for some really delicious desserts. These sticky buns are…
White Bunny Carrot Cakes
So when it comes to Easter, I don’t really celebrate it. Growing up in a Buddhist household, Easter as a holiday just meant that time of year when there’s lots of rabbits, ducks, marshmallows, polka dots, colorful eggs, and randomly, jellybeans. That’s literally all Easter means to me to be honest. With that in mind,…
Shaymin Nerikiri
I would be lying if I said this recipe was easy. Namely because it took me 4 hours from start to finish. A lot of it, not going to lie, is just the amount of time it took perfecting the color and shape of these little nuggets. That and I tried to make a half-batch…
Bamboo dreams: a flower cake
I created this cake as an homage to my own childhood of Asian rice-based desserts, while also doing a nod to the greenery I would see growing up in Southern California by the coast. I wanted this cake to capture both the aforementioned flavors of Asian desserts, and the aforementioned scenery of flowers by the…
Gluten-free sesame-buckwheat mousse cake
I had yet to make a true vegan chiffon cake prior to writing and testing out this recipe. Last year, I did make a pumpkin roll cake, but it was not a true chiffon batter, just a cake roll. When I say chiffon, I’m talking whipped whites folded into an egg yolk mixture. Doing so…
Vegan “Oreo” macarons
Randomly enough, one of my earliest childhood memories in Taiwan was actually buying Oreos from the 7-11 at the first floor of our Linkuo apartment, and dipping them into Taiwanese milk. Besides the fact that Taiwanese milk is absolutely delicious(it’s something in the grass those cows eat, I swear, but it’s naturally a lot sweeter…
Tahini panna cotta with soy sauce caramel
So I made a riff on this dessert about a year ago for a digital cook-along event for the Boys and Girls Club of Rochester, Minnesota(thank you, Shari for inviting me to do this!). For them, I did a demo on a dessert, which would be delivered to those who participated. For the dessert that…
Gluten free pumpkin cake roll
I literally came up with this recipe for my coworker, Holly. It was her last day at work, and she has a gluten allergy, so I wanted to make something that embraced the seasonality of it being fall, but also made 100% without gluten. I have never quite made a gluten-free chiffon cake before, so…
Matcha-yuzu macarons
I was in the mood to make some macarons the other day, and these were what I came up with! I wanted to definitely do matcha, since it’s been a while since I made matcha-flavored anything, and I figured, just to make them a little unique, why not add some yuzu to them? The shells…
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….
Head in the clouds: a plated dessert
The inspiration for this dessert came from me testing out a couple new techniques – using sago, which are little tapioca pearls, to make a strawberry flavored “caviar”, and using lychee juice to make a foam. I wanted to create this sort of ethereal, sea-meets-sky, summery sort of dessert, embracing fresh lychees, and pairing them…
Red bean doughnuts(an-doughnut) with roasted miso sugar
These doughnuts were inspired by an-doughnuts(red bean doughnuts) that I found in my local Japanese grocery store. The doughnuts that I purchased were a cake doughnut base with a chunkier red bean paste(called tsubu-an) in the middle, finished with granulated sugar around it. While I liked the concept of it, I felt like there was…
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…
Meyer lemon basque cheesecake with Meyer lemon cream
Basque cheesecake will forever be that quintessential ugly delicious dessert for me. Well, that and worms and dirt. You can’t make worms and dirt look pretty, and that’s perfectly fine with me. With this particular basque cheesecake, I had a ton of Meyer lemons lying around, to the point where you’d think that they just…
Gluten-free coconut-lime cheesecakes
I have been craving Magnolia Bakery’s lime and coconut cheesecake since I had it years ago when I visited New York. While one can make the argument that I could just drive to Downtown L.A. to get it, I’m lazy. Lazy enough to try making my own version of it, anyways. So for the cake,…
Kirimochi waffles
This is literally the simplest recipe I have ever posted on this blog. Mostly because it was something I thought of randomly when I was watching videos of Japanese chefs making yakimochi. Yakimochi is a grilled mochi, made by slowly charring kirimochi. Now, kirimochi is a mochi that is slowly dried out until it is…
Chocolate, olive oil, and sea salt macarons
I just randomly had the urge to make macarons with this specific flavor combination one day. The idea of rich dark chocolate against grassy olive oil, and sea salt to just bring both together, it made a lot of sense to me. Kind of like a chocolate zucchini bread, which as weird as it sounds,…
Freddy's Harajuku 