Originally this was supposed to be a birthday cake order for a client, but they cancelled after I already baked the cake, stacked it up, and was about to decorate it. My client wanted a cake large enough to feed a family of 10-12(which is honestly way beyond the usual portions I serve, since I…
Tag: layer cake
Stracciatella Layer Cake
Unless you’ve been to a place that sells Italian ice cream, you might be wondering what stracciatella is. In Italian, it translates to “little rags”. And in Lombardy, stracciatella is a kind of gelato, that is creamy vanilla with shards of chocolate running through it. In other regions of Italy, it could refer to a…
Maple-candied Pumpkin and Acorn Cake
This cake was inspired from when I was in Kyoto, admiring all of the autumn nature-themed artwork in several of the local museums there. I wanted to make this yellow-ish cake with pretty reds and oranges, indicative of autumnal colors, and flavors. And since I play Animal Crossing, I am fully aware that maple leaves…
Caramel Apple Naked Cake
This cake was a special request from my dear friend, Justina. She wanted an apple pie-inspired Milkbar naked cake for her birthday, and I just wanted to make sure it was 100% to her liking. She wanted there to be doughy, buttery bits, caramelized chunks of apples, and some sort of creamy component, all of…
(F)red Velvet-Berry Cheesecake Layer Cake
This red velvet cake recipe came about because I had leftover mixed berry coulis in my fridge and leftover graham crackers from the Graham Central Station cake, and I needed to figure out how to get rid of them. Initially, I wanted to do a ruby chocolate-mixed berry cheesecake, but I also wanted to do…
Assam Tea Buttercream Cake
Growing up in a Taiwanese/Chinese-American household, almost all of our plateware was white and blue porcelain. To this day, I still don’t fully get why it was that color, but the pattern has really grown on me over the years. To the point where I really wanted to make a cake as an homage to…
Thai Tea-Coconut Carrot Cake
This recipe came about because I had a bunch of carrots I needed to get rid of. A while ago, my friends and I visited a farm in Irvine, with the intention of going strawberry picking. But because of all the torrential rain Southern California has been experiencing, the strawberry crops were dead, and we…
Tonka Bean Black Forest Cake
Black forest cake was my birthday cake growing up for the first 13 years of my life. Not because I particularly liked it, but because we would always go back to Taiwan for my birthday/winter break, and celebrate it at my grandma’s apartment in Taipei. And the only cake that the bakery underneath her apartment…
Pink Peaches and Cream Cake
This cake was my original intended gift for my mom on Mother’s Day, before I found out that white peaches weren’t in season in May. For this recipe, I went with white peaches for a filling, as a reference to my childhood. Growing up, we had white peach trees in our backyard, and every summer,…
The Choco-Bear Cake
This cake was for a baby shower, where the invite featured a cute little teddy bear with light blue balloons. I wanted to pay homage to that image, and carry it through, along with the color scheme of the party in general, in the form of this cake. The clients requested the cake to be…
Yellow Chiffon Layer Cake with Blonde Chocolate
Truthfully, I never really understood yellow cake. I just assumed it was a vanilla cake with a lot of yellow food coloring in it. But turns out, yellow cake is not yellow from food coloring, but from the usage of butter in place of oil, and egg yolks. An abundance of egg yolks results in…
Uber Fluffy Chocolate Layer Cake
This chocolate cake is the intersection of everything I could possibly want from a chocolate cake. The sponge is somehow both fudgy and rich, but light and springy with this almost honeycomb-like crumb structure that could only be achieved by whipping the living hell out of egg whites, and adding in just the right amount…
Nutella-Cold Brew Cake
I made this cake mostly because I wanted to create a chocolate-forward cake. That and I wanted it to be a little playful and sophisticated, using black(Dutch-processed) cacao to add a fruitier cocoa flavor, as well as cold brew to intensify the chocolate flavor, and Nutella, because why not? Nutella makes everything better, unless you…
Cafe de Olla Naked Cake
This cake is an homage to my friend, Frances. When we used to work together, our morning ritual was going to our workplace cafeteria, getting coffee and toast, and dicking around instead of doing actual work enjoying a mini breakfast together at our desks. In honor of her graduating college, I had to make a…
Funfetti Chiffon Cake with Milk Candy French Buttercream
I have already made a funfetti cake or two before, but I wanted to do an entirely different take on them with a more subtle and minimalistic approach. I wanted this almost completely buttercream-covered cake with just a slight sprinkle(all puns intended) of color on top, and then when you cut into it, there are…
Milk tea-white sesame cake
I was asked to make a super last-minute cake for an order, and that’s how this recipe came out. Literally just because I was told “any flavor but it needs to be done by tomorrow”. So with that in mind, I somehow came up with this recipe. I had a lot of black tea leaves…
Buckeye Layer Cake
Depending on what part of the world you are in, you may or may not know what a buckeye is. If you happen to be from Ohio, you’ll definitely know buckeye, as they are basically the state’s official dessert! Peanut butter fudge balls partially dipped in chocolate to resemble the nut of a buckeye tree,…
Milkbar Buddy Cake
When I first got publicly eliminated during season 10 of Masterchef, and it came out that I would be working at Milkbar LA, one of the first people to reach out to me was none other than Samantha from season 9! Samantha, or Sam as we call her in real life, was working at Milkbar…
Chocolate Fraisier Cake
Now I have done Fraisier cakes in the past. What I love is the appearance, being this perfectly cylindrical cake with slices of strawberries peeking out from the cream that the layers of sponge are sandwiching. For this rendition, I wanted to go with a chocolate-ish version of it, featuring a fluffy black cacao sponge,…
Chocolate-Coffee Layer cake
This cake is basically a chocolate and coffee lover’s dream. Layers of dark chocolate cake with an Ovaltine latte soak, whipped chocolate ganache, a chocolate cookie crumb, cocoa-coffee French buttercream, and coffee tuiles. With each layer, I wanted to make sure they all brought different forms or textures of chocolate or coffee. We have the…
Freddy's Harajuku 