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…
Tag: pastry
Pink Peach-Moscato Pound Cake
So this recipe came about because I had leftover pink peaches from another recipe, and I did not want those to go to waste. Pink peaches are made by taking the peels off of white peaches, turning that into a simple syrup, then cooking the white peaches in said simple syrup. The syrup, through being…
Spheal Dango
Originally, these were just going to be ring seal dango(round mochi-type rice dumplings). However, that idea kind of shifted towards doing Spheals instead thanks to my dear friend, Justina, who straight up to me to do that. And I am (mostly) glad I listened to her, especially after seeing the end product! I say mostly…
Pink Peach and Calpico Cheesecake
This pink peach dessert came about because I was gifted with some white peaches from my mom, and whenever I have white peaches, making a pink peach dessert is a priority! I grew up with a white peach tree in my backyard, and I always equate those to pleasant summer memories, eating white peaches with…
(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…
Pumpkin Toast with Koji Mascarpone
This is one of those rare instances where all of the ingredients for this recipe happened to be all there in my refrigerator already. I had leftover pumpkin from making a cake with it, I had bread from a failed milk bread sandwich attempt, and I had both heavy cream and koji as my usual…
Gulab Jamun Madeleines
Gulab (and angoori) jamun have quickly become one of my favorite Indian desserts. These little ghee-fried milk balls are soaked in a saffron-cardamom-rose syrup, causing them to have a soft, melt-in-the-mouth texture. However, I find that setting up all of that ghee to fry with takes forever, and it’s really expensive too. Ghee is far…
Chocolate-Rose Quartz-Pistachio Cookies
So I have made a version of these rose quartz cookies in the past, but I wanted to revisit the original recipe I made during my time at Milkbar, which featured a chocolate cookie embedded with Turkish delight(also called loukoumi, and they are like these sugary, pink rose-flavored jellies). The Turkish delight, which are primarily…
Fig Leaf Financier
For starters, this is a gluten-free and vegan recipe. I had to get that out of the way first and foremost. Secondly, you might be asking, what is fig leaf, and what does it taste like? As the name implies, a fig leaf is literally the leaf of a fig plant. It has an herbaceous,…
Kir Royale Mousse Cake
Whenever I think of a fancy flavoring for a cake, I immediately go to kir royale. Mostly because of Patisserie Chantilly in Lomita, where they do a kir royale mousse. With this classic French cocktail, you have the rich fruity notes of black currant against the light, tart notes of the champagne. It is a…
Pink Taiwanese Pineapple Cakes
Pineapple cakes, or in Chinese 鳳梨酥(feng-li-su), are these buttery, flaky pastries that are stuffed with a sweet pineapple jam. Honestly, I have never bothered to make them before, since it’s so easy to purchase them, and almost every Taiwanese household has them just lying around to snack on! However, I had leftover pink pineapple that…
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…
Blood Moon: a petit gateau
For this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, I wanted to do a few different kinds of moon cakes. Some more traditional, and some, a new interpretation of the term “moon cake”. In this case, I wanted to do not one, but two petit gateau, both moon-themed. One would be inspired by the full moon, but the other,…
Moonlight Delight: a petit gateau
When Mid-Autumn Festival rolls around, that means it’s moon cake season! And while I do love moon cakes, I wanted to make a new interpretation of them, by making petit gateau(mini mousse cakes) with moon motifs! I wanted there to be two, one inspired by a blood moon using dark and red colors, and one…
Om Ali with Pistachio-Cardamom Cream
I came up with this recipe because I had a lot of leftover brioche and phyllo, and I needed to use it up someway, somehow. Luckily for me, there is a dessert that literally can use up both, which meant that I did not have to sacrifice space in my freezer for either of those…
Chocolate-Peanut Butter Muffins
I am actually surprised by how few times in my life I have made muffins. Back before I even started learning how to bake, my sister would make these banana-Nutella muffins all the time, so you would think that I would have taken my hand at something similar, but I guess I just haven’t felt…
Black Sesame-Cherry Crostata
Sometimes a good recipe comes about because you have a TON of leftover components in your refrigerator, and it forces you to get creative. I don’t think I would have come up with the combination of black sesame and cherry anytime soon had it not been for the fact that I had leftover black sesame…
Blueberry-Yuzu Mochi Ice Cream
I adore the combination of blueberry and citrus. It just takes me back to living in New England, where the Maine blueberries and the abundance or either Meyer lemon or blood orange was such a common yet effective dessert combination. I also love making mochi ice cream, and plating it up in a presentable dessert…
Clodsire Mochi Puffs
Clodsire is a new friend-shaped Pokemon that is an alternate evolution to Wooper. In a way, it’s a Quagsire that decided to live life laying down, and somehow developed these purple spots on its back where it can spring out its poisonous spines. So despite looking hilariously adorable, Clodsire can be extremely terrifying. Luckily, these…
Maple Langue de Chat
Langue de chat are a thin French cookie, similar to like a tuile, or a Milano cookie. The translation to English is rather unappetizing, meaning “cat tongues”, but I can assure you that these cookies are quite addictive. In Japan, a popular method of preparing them includes baking them into ornate squares, and sandwiching them…
Freddy's Harajuku 