This dish came about because my friend Karen was growing okra in her backyard, and she gifted me with a ton of it when I hung out with her. My initial thoughts on what to do with the okra were either a curry or a gumbo, but then I thought about something lighter and more…
Tag: Japanese
Pork belly okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes)
Okonomiyaki are one of my personal favorite things to make. The first time I ever had one was with my cousins, and it was delicious. It’s a Japanese pancake batter that can have a variety of things in it, but typically you would find cabbage, pork, and a delicious sauce and Japanese mayonnaise. A lot…
Marimo truffles
I love how the Japanese manage to make everything cute. From clione (basically sea slugs, but they’re called sea angels), to daruma (those giant red and white dolls with the crazy eyes and mustaches), to marimo (little aquatic moss balls that some children even keep as pets). Marimo are super adorable, just because they’re perfectly…
Matcha jade layer cake
The idea of this dessert came from wanting to create a layer cake that was visually reminiscent of a garden. I wound up with a dessert that had the gradient of a jade stone, which is still not bad, so pleasant surprises, you know? When it comes to using matcha, getting it to the right…
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…
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…
Matcha sugar doughnuts
For my Advanced Food and Beverage concept, BA- (a 2 1/2 in one Japanese dining experience), we featured a morning bakery called Panya, which would turn into an izakaya (Japanese gastropub) at night. Panya boasted a lot of cute and simple baked goods and doubled as a cafe in the morning. One of our signatures…
Toasted soy chiffon cake with lemon curd cream and blackberries
So I first came up with this concept because my parents needed me to prepare a dessert for their friend’s 4th of July party (that I wasn’t even invited to)….bastards. Since they were all old anyways, my parents told me specifically to use less sugar….I’m starting to feel less salty about not being invited. No…
Matcha hokkaido cupcakes
I’ve been craving Hokkaido styled cupcakes ever since I saw them in the display of a bakery in Nagoya last summer. These cute little cupcakes with a tiny dollop of cream. Simple and cute is the easiest way to describe them. These kinds of cupcakes are often described as cloud-like, which is why I opted…
Mochiko milk rolls
This recipe came a multitude of reasons. The first being me accidentally buying 8 sticks of salted butter and needing to use them somehow, the second being that I was craving homemade bread with oxtail stew, and the third being I miss Japanese-styled bakeries, and those fluffy milk rolls they’d always sell. So after doing…
Freddy's Harajuku 