Banana-Mixed Grains Tart

This recipe came about because I had a ton of super ripe bananas I needed to get rid of, and I wanted to get rid of these bananas in a somewhat extravagant fashion. I say somewhat because this tart has a decent amount of bells and whistles to it. Namely in the little craquelin choquettes…

Malted miso and black vinegar chocolate cake: Season 10 Revisited

This is my updated take on the “shines forever” dessert that got Gordon Ramsay licking the plate clean. The main differences being the usage of black cacao powder to really intensify the flavor of the cake. I also updated plating style to be more in line with something I would present now, as opposed to…

Honeybee Doughnuts

My initial idea when I came up with these doughnuts were to do these little puffy fritters and garnish them with a honey drizzle and bee pollen. But then I really got thinking about them, and wanted to do a more literal translation of what these could be. I thought first about striping the doughnut…

Matcha “jiggly” cheesecake

There is a common misconception about the “jiggly” cheesecake that has gone viral over the past 5 years: everyone seems to think that this kind of cheesecake is like a panna cotta and wobbles perpetually until it is time to eat it. However, the cheesecake is only jiggly fresh out of the oven, when it…

“Tiramisu” cookies

I always wanted to do a take on a ricotta cookie, but I was never quite sure what direction to go with them beyond that. The idea of putting a soft cheese into a cookie dough was intriguing , just because I was always curious how that would affect a cookie’s consistency over using butter…

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…

Beet red velvet cupcakes with rose cream cheese frosting

Thanks to my friend Roshni, I was invited to be one of thirty featured “artists” for Lemonade’s Lemonade Social Festival. For this live streaming event, I got a chance to demonstrate how to bake something, and in my case, I decided on a fun take on red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I wanted…

Blood orange-mascarpone cake doughnuts

These literally just came from an experiment where I wanted to make doughnuts, but I didn’t have any yeast, and I was too lazy to buy any/I had no patience to wait for yeast to proof anyways. I knew that you could make cake doughnuts, which would not require yeast, and I decided to go…

“Shines Forever”: my signature malted chocolate cake

This chocolate cake recipe is the very same chocolate cake that actually won me my white apron in season 10 of the American version of MasterChef! During the casting process, we had to submit four signature dishes that we could make in 45 minutes, and this was the one I had practiced the most (before…

Cider doughnut creams

Whenever I think of the fall, I think of apple picking in New England and drinking hot cider and shit. It’s hilarious because I never actually would go apple picking because I could just go into my dining hall and steal a fuckload of apples anyways, so why travel miles and miles to do it…

Sea salt ice cream with coconut cream

I really love doing different renditions on the iconic sea salt ice cream from Kingdom Hearts 2. There is just something about it that reminds me of summers at the beach…oh wait, that’s just the summer for me, because I’m from Los Angeles, and I happen to work nearby the beach. But anyways, it just…

Apple-bee pollen cheesecake

When I made this cake originally, I made the mistake of using yogurt. Why is yogurt a mistake? Because it will leech out a ton of water (almost an endless supply of it to be frank) and make whatever is unfortunately underneath it a soggy mess. So while the original recipe calls for using yogurt…

Russian Honey-Bunny Cake

The Russian honey cake, called Medovik in Russian, is very similar to the American icebox cake. It is layers of wafers or cookies sandwiching layers of cream. In the case of Medovik, you use honey-infused cookie dough, made by caramelizing honey, whipping that into eggs and butter, and slowly adding in the flour, little by…

Matchamisu naked layer cake

When I open Harajuku Cream Handle (a cheap, Taiwanese knock-off of Momofuku Milk Bar that shall actually never come into fruition for many potential lawsuit-related reasons), the matchamisu naked layer cake is going to be displayed to the world in all of its gorgeous, bare glory. Ew, that sounded horrible and I regret saying that…

Bee pollen baklava

I can’t believe it took me this long to finally post a recipe that features homemade phyllo. Fun fact: I learned how to make phyllo from scratch the Montenegrin way from watching the Australian cooking competition, My Kitchen Rules, when a contestant, Zana, this snarky, germaphobic, perfectionist Montenegrin-Albanian lawyer made her own phyllo from scratch quite…

Blueberry-olive oil friand, lemon curd, mascarpone sorbet

This recipe is a tweak on a dish I have been making for years. Blueberry, olive oil, and lemon have found themselves in several of my cakes ever since I found out that olive oil cake is a thing. This particular rendition came about when I was cooking with my friend Carolyn, and we wanted…

Homemade mascarpone cheese

I initially learned about mascarpone (don’t pronounce it “marscapone” unless you want a fork in your eyes) while watching episodes of the Food Network’s Chopped. Keep in mind, this was back in high school, when I had just began to like baking and cooking, so seeing mascarpone, I had no clue what it even was. But…