These tiramisu were made because I got a request to do a coffee-free tiramisu featuring chocolate and cinnamon in some form or capacity. With tiramisu, there are four core components. The sponge, usually ladyfingers or savioardi biscuits, a caffeinated soak that is usually spiked with rum or amoretto, a creamy mascarpone situation, and the cocoa…
Tag: jaconde
Strawberry-Pistachio-Lemon Mirror Glaze Cake
Strawberry and pistachio will always be on of my favorite dessert combinations – the tartness of red fruit against the salty, crunchy, smokiness of a pistachio is just so addictive. It also might be because my birthday is so close to Christmas that I just love the color contrast between red/pink and green. Pistachio and…
Peach-Osmanthus-Ginger Entremet
Hilariously enough, the three main ingredients in this entremet(French set mousse cake) form the acronym P.O.G., which is also used in Hawaiian cuisine to reference passionfruit-orange-guava juice. In this case, this P.O.G. refers to peach, osmanthus, and ginger, which happen to be three of my mom’s favorite ingredients. Growing up, we had a white peach…
Lil Chickie Mango Puddings
I have an awkward confession: I hated mango as a child. Something about fruits with a scratchy, fibrous texture that just did not agree with me back then – 8 year old Fred was looking at you too, pineapple. Because of that, I never really understood was mangos tasted like until I was maybe around…
Black cacao tiramisu: a petit gateau
The first time I ever worked with black cacao was actually at Milkbar, when I had some downtime to test whatever I wanted. I stumbled upon a small container of black cacao powder, and I was really curious. I opened it, sniffed it a little, and it had this earthy, but fragrant aroma. It was…
Cafe de olla cake
When I was doing research on Latin cuisine, I came across an interesting beverage called cafe de olla. It is an earthy coffee drink with spices, namely cinnamon, anise, and clove, sometimes orange, in it that is normally served in a clay cup. It sounded like a lot of beautiful flavors, to be honest, and…
Ivory Spring: a petite gateau
I feel like it has been a while since I brought out the wooden sake cups, well that, and I knew that I wanted to make something green in the spirit of St. Patty’s day, so that’s where the idea to make a matcha-misu (matcha-flavored tiramisu) came from. I had some really cool flavors of…
Voices of the forest: a layer cake
I really wanted to make another Opera cake, but I didn’t want to be too repetitive or just fall back on the same flavors. So I changed it up…slightly. Instead of coffee, I went with barley tea instead. I love barley tea. It’s something I grew up drinking in Taiwan during the summers! It’s refreshing,…
Nexus: a ruby chocolate entremet
I was originally going to do a rose, ruby chocolate, and pistachio tiramisu when I was conceptualizing this dessert, but then I thought about the presentation, and how I really didn’t want it to look too similar to my dreaming of springtime dessert. So instead, I opted for an entremet instead. The flavor combination of…
Mixed Berry Opera cake
I made this cake with my friend Adrienne just because I’m still trying to convince her to audition for season 11 of MasterChef and I wanted to see how quickly she can pick up arguably a tricky cake to make. Ever since my first Opera cake, I wanted to do another rendition, but using more…
Gateau Opera
So Gateau Opera is one of those desserts that I have read a lot about, but never really bothered to try making on my own. I have made the sponge, jaconde, before, and obviously, I have made ganache before. But the other filling, which is a coffee infused French buttercream, not so much. For those…
Freddy's Harajuku 