What when I was doing R&D at Milkbar, I fell in love with embedding desserts with Turkish delight to give them a gemstone aesthetic. So these cake pops were a slight homage to that(and also they were for a baby shower, so I wanted to go with something more pastel-pink to reflect that). For those…
Tag: Olive Oil
Pink Lemon-Olive Oil-Rose Cake
This cake is dedicated to my friend, Na’ama, specifically for her birthday. Fun facts, she was one of my friends that attended my apron battle for season 12(she was in the podium instead of the balcony), and we went to college together, but did not actually know each other back then. Since Boston University was…
Egg Sandwiches with Homemade Milk Bread
This recipe is a thank-you letter to my mom, since she not only taught me how to make the perfect boiled egg, but gifted me with this super cute bento box, and I have been dying to use it to plate something. Between eggs and the bento, it just made sense to either do something…
Open-Faced Pistachio-Strawberry Tart
I personally love the combination of strawberry and pistachio. Strawberries are tart, sweet, and are just such a beautiful red color. Pistachios can be crunchy, creamy, smoky, and salty. The two really balance each other nicely, especially when sugar enhances both ingredients separately. Strawberries with sugar is such a simple combination, but the sugar really…
Confit Garlic Knots with Chili-Lemon Crema
Back in the tail end of 2017, a freshly-minted 23-year Fred was forced to go to a department outing at his first job, on his birthday. Because his boss at the time decided it would be a great idea to plan a department outing on his birthday without telling him. So beyond the fact that…
Black Rose Entremet
It’s been a minute since I’ve last tackled an entremet, so I wanted to do another one, as I had a bunch of random components here and there that I knew I could use. I was making Turkish delight for Pinktober and realized that I had an entire piping bag of leftover ruby chocolate mousse…
Olive oil-chocolate bundt cakes
This recipe is really my idea of what some hipstery cafe in Silverlake would serve. Not saying that in a mean or even malicious way, since I am guilty of going to said hipstery cafes in Silverlake with my friends from time to time. Olive oil cake has been trending up a lot in LA…
Sourdough Socca
Since I have a lot of sourdough starter leftover from the pita recipe, I wanted to test out some more flatbreads that I could make with it. So that’s when I decided on socca. Also called farinata, socca is a European flatbread made from chickpea flour(also called garbonzo bean flour!). Because of that, it is…
Sourdough Pita
The initial idea for this recipe came about because my friend Sylvie was nonstop raving about how good the sourdough at Bavel in LA is. To quote, she said it was the fluffiest pita bread she ever had. And that piqued my interest. I happened to own the Bavel cookbook, so I looked up their…
Pistachio and EVOO Mimosa Cake
Mimosa cakes have steadily become one of my favorite kinds of cakes to bake over the past 4 years. Mostly because I love cutting up cake into cubes, in case you haven’t already figure that out. For this specific recipe, I wanted to utilize yuzu as well, just to add something tart and bright to…
Brioche and pesto buns
I have been meaning to make these for a couple months now. A few years ago, my sister and I were watching Mind of a Chef, and more specifically, an episode that featured chef April Bloomfield. In that episode, she was making these “breakfast buns”, which consisted of puff pastry and a broccoli rabe pesto….
Super simple pita bread
While in the midst of my crash dieting, I have developed some hilariously random cravings. Super fluffy pita bread has been one of those. About a year ago, I had dinner with my friends in downtown LA, at a restaurant called Girl and the Goat(which is best known for their flagship in Chicago, and being…
Baklava layer cake
For the first half of March, my goal was to make as many green things as possible. This cake, while not outwardly green, has a green pistachio sponge hidden underneath a layer of spiced honey French buttercream. I love baklava, and wanted to translate the flavors, textures, and ingredients of it into a full-on layer…
Pretty in pink olive and rose cake
This was my 2nd/3rd take on the “Bomb-ass” Poosh cake. For those who were unaware, Poosh is Kourtney Kardashian’s company, and they did a collaboration with an olive oil cake bakery called Little House of Confections to bring to life this cute little pink olive oil cake, which they called the Poosh cake. The original…
Turkish Simit
I first heard about simit years ago when I was binging The Chef’s Line on Netflix. The show is a cooking competition between home cooks and the team from a restaurant, and each week centers around a different restaurant and their style of cuisine. There was a Turkish week where I just learned a lot…
Deep Dive: a plated dish
Of the five dishes from the “Namie” pop-up, I would say this was probably the one with the least amount of true Asian influence. While I took more inspiration from Halal/Middle Eastern flavors, it would be a stretch to say that it took influence from Halal-Chinese food, when it was more Jordanian with sprinkles of…
Blood orange upside down cake
I have made this recipe before, but I think it was on TikTok, back when I actually had/used that app. This cake consists of a layer of caramel-laden blood orange slices that are sitting on top of a dense but delicious olive oil cake. It’s fairly straightforward in flavor profile, and pretty fun to make,…
Chocolate, olive oil, and sea salt macarons
I just randomly had the urge to make macarons with this specific flavor combination one day. The idea of rich dark chocolate against grassy olive oil, and sea salt to just bring both together, it made a lot of sense to me. Kind of like a chocolate zucchini bread, which as weird as it sounds,…
Blackberry-semolina cake with olive oil and Meyer lemons
I literally came up with this recipe because I went to the grocery store, and saw 99-cent cartons of blackberries on sale! I knew it was a sign from whatever powers that be that I had to make something with these, so I bought about three 6oz containers of them! I had a couple of…
“Beautiful World”: a plated dessert
So I conceptualized this dessert around initially two flavors, being pistachio and olive oil. From there, I sort of expanded it to include rosemary and lemon, since I have fresh rosemary in my backyard, which has been blooming these beautiful flowers, and the lemon adds a nice acidity to counterbalance all of the other ingredients….
Freddy's Harajuku 