milk tea – Freddy's Harajuku

Persimmon Tea Cakes

I am fortunate in that a ton of my family friends own persimmon trees. While it is delightful to eat fresh persimmon in peak season at first, admittedly, when you are gifted with 5 pounds of it, you start getting… fatigued by the taste. These little tea cakes were my answer to needing a new…

Milk Tea Hot Chocolate

I have been making this miso-hojicha milk tea in a variety of desserts, on and off, for 2 years now. Needless to say, I have been trying to make miso-hojicha sugar happen with as much vigor as Gretchen Wieners from Mean Girls has with the word “fetch”. Also, side note, but did anyone else not…

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…

Milk Tea Snow Skin Mooncakes

A few years ago, I wanted to make snow skin mooncakes, but I did not have the molds for those. The difference between a snow skin mooncake and the traditional mooncake is that the snow skin ones are made with mochi as the wrapper, whereas the traditional mooncakes are baked pastries. While I did not…

Strawberry tea time: an entremet

With this dessert, I really was aiming to utilize some leftover goat cheese and strawberry puree I had lying around. While I initially thought about doing a cheesecake with those two components, I figured that I could make it into something more fun, and go with an entremet, or a mousse cake! Since strawberries and…

Milk tea cream puffs

These cream puffs were the result of me craving milk tea in dessert form, but not wanting to do another panna cotta or ice cream. So instead, my mind went to pate choux, or cream puffs. Since I make hojicha(toasted sencha or Japanese green tea) sugar quite regularly, I knew I could use that to…

Basic Betch Birthday Cake

I will be honest. I never grew up on funfetti cake. My Buddhist health nut mother would not let anything artificially colored into our household, so we would not even have certain kinds of cereal. Because of that, funfetti was definitely not a thing in my childhood. I would see other children eating cakes with…

Milk tea apple tart

For me, apple pie brings back fond memories…of making a fool of myself on national television. Besides the fact that apple tarte tatin lives rent free in my head and nightmares, I do love the idea of roasted apples and a buttery pastry, regardless of if those things are directly related to one of the…

Milk tea cookies with chewy “boba” bits

I really was inspired to make this dessert from seeing all of the “boba” desserts on Instagram. Truthfully, the idea of eating boba that is not warm and soft doesn’t appeal to me, and more times than not, boba sitting out on a pie or a cheesecake will turn hard and cold really quickly. Then…

Miso hojicha cookies with milk tea jam

I feel like one thing that I came come to love making during quarantine and social distancing is miso-hojicha sugar. It is honestly like a miracle ingredient, just because it is sweet, salty, creamy, toasty and smoky. Honestly, it’s a perfect ingredient to use in many desserts, and I used them in these cookies just…

Counting stars: a plated dessert

I actually came up with this concept when I was testing a dessert recipe for an upcoming pop-up in Dallas. Unfortunately, the test run didn’t necessarily go as planned, but I didn’t want to throw away the ingredients, so I shifted gears, and went with a rice pudding instead. What I love about rice pudding…

Tiger sugar boba ice cream

So these have been a dessert craze that had taken the Internet and all of my local Asian supermarkets by storm. For those of you who don’t know what they are, these are ice cream bars/popsicles made with milk, brown sugar syrup, and chewy, soft boba. Despite being frozen, the boba is still soft, which…

Find my heaven: a plated dessert

I really wanted to try branching out and doing new things this year, be it with techniques or plating. The dessert itself is inspired by me just trying to find my happy place in the kitchen, and obviously, that’s through baking and cooking with Asian-fusion influences. So I went with a hojicha panna cotta with…

Pear tarte tatin with milk tea crème anglaise

As somebody who has suffered prior trauma from tarte tatin, I can tell you now that I’ve made at least ten of them this year alone. To celebrate the fall, and to use the free bosc pears that were lying around at work, I wanted to make yet another tarte tatin. This time, I decided…

Blackberry-almond Arnold Palmer cake

This was a cake I made with my dad in mind, for his birthday. He loves to golf, so the Arnold Palmer is a caddy shack reference. He loves my lemon curd cakes, to the point where he has actually eaten a cake I made before I even finished decorating or photographing it before, so…

Royal milk tea mousse cake

This dessert was directly inspired from Lady M Cake Boutique. I have only recently come to realize that the damn cakes there drill holes in your wallet more effectively than I could ever drill biology concepts into my own brain. Screw you AP Bio, I have baking. Which is a science. But much cooler than…

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…