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: pastry
Black Sesame and Strawberry Lemonade Cookie Sandwiches
This recipe is a slight homage to a PB&J sandwich, but in cookie form. I have recently been obsessed with Sanritsu sandwich cookies(imagine two tuiles sandwiching a pleasantly sweet creamy filling), and wanted to try making a rendition of them. Instead of doing a buttercream or ganache, since I had leftover strawberry puree and a…
Starry Night Lavender Cake Pops
Lavender, or “valender” as my English-is-his-second-language dad would call it, is such a polarizing ingredient to cook with. Outside of France, nobody else really cooks or bakes with lavender. It is distinctly floral, and in too large of a quantity, very medicinal. However, I find that beyond smelling really pleasant in smaller dosages, lavender definitely…
Cold Brew-Butter Mochi Crumb Cakes
This recipe came about because my extremely talented friend, Ahran, launched her own product, being vanilla-flavored cold brew concentrate, with Coba coffee, and she was generous enough to gift me some of it! I actually enjoyed the product quite a bit, because you have the sweet fragrance of vanilla against the bitter richness of the…
Purple Yam-Yam Puffs
This recipe came about while I was making these during a bake-together with my friend, Ahran! The theme was to make fun or cute cream puffs with interesting flavors. Ahran did a coffee-mascarpone puff, using cold brew in the filling and in the pate choux, and glazing them in a cold brew ganache, which was…
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…
Sticky Toffee “Cinnabon” Loaves
One of my personal favorite memories during filming Masterchef: Back to Win was when a bunch of us(i.e. Gabriel, Samantha, Dara, and I) ordered Cinnabon to where we were staying, and we just ate Cinnabon while trying not to feel stressed about the competition(before anyone asks, Bri had an appointment when that happened, or else…
Super Soft Mango Mochi
This recipe was directly inspired by the mango mochi at ECK Bakery in Houston(special thank you to my friend Amanda for taking me there, because the mochi was incredibly delicious!). So on my recent trip to Texas, I stopped by in both Austin and with my friend Amanda and her husband Jimin, we all went…
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…
Hanami Chiffon Sandwich
I’ve made it a point to make hanami desserts every single year, so I definitely did not want to stop that trend this year. Hana-mi refers to flower viewing, specifically the viewing of cherry blossoms blooming every spring. As a whole, this is meant to symbolize the beginning of a new year, or at least…
Coconut Bunny Cookies
These coconut bunny cookies were the brainchild of me wanting to make a cream cheese-based cookie, and me wanting to do something bunny-themed that was rolled in coconut flakes. What I love about cream cheese cookies is that they have this soft, melt-in-the-mouth texture to them that can only be accomplished by baking a dough…
Snow Bunny Dango
Inspiration was from Paper Mario, and Super Paper Mario, where there was an item called the Snow Bunny. From how they looked, a Snow Bunny resembled an usagi manju, which is a Japanese bun shaped like a rabbit. These manju are quite cute, usually being made with mochi, although I have seen baked varieties as…
Sesame Checkerboard Bunnies
I felt major FOMO when I saw so many of my fellow Asian bakers posting bunny-themed desserts during Lunar New Years(I was unfortunately in Texas during the week leading up to it with limited access to a kitchen, so I could not join in on the bunny dessert festivities nor did I have the foresight…
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…
Molten Nutella Chip Cookies
While I was practicing intermittent fasting/crash dieting prior to my Hawaii trip, I was craving a lot of different things, which was both good in that I was able to really drill down on the foods I was craving to eat, and bad because I was craving food that actually tasted good, and was not…
Matzoh Crack Rusks
This recipe was the biproduct of me making Japanese-style sando’s and cutting the crusts off the homemade milk bread I used to assemble those with. After making all of my sando’s, I literally had a fish tub-sized container of bread crusts leftover. It felt like a shame to just throw the crusts away after all…
Tokyo Banana Chiffon Sandwiches
Tokyo Banana will always take me back to trips to Japan, where I would eat the soft fluffy snack cakes, stuffed with a banana cream often. When I was conceptualizing a fun chiffon cake sandwich recipe, one of my immediate go-to’s was none other than Tokyo Banana. When it comes to banana-flavored desserts, I learned…
Matcha Cream Chiffon Sandwiches
Perfect in time for St. Patrick’s Day, my next chiffon sandwich recipe is for matcha green tea-flavored! I feel like everyone has at least had matcha in the form of green tea ice cream before, and what I love about pairing matcha with dessert is that sugar and dairy are great vehicles to balance out…
Thin Mint Lunchbox Cake
So in the rare instances where Bri and I get to hang out, cooking is always one of the things we do together. We wanted to bake a cake together, and it just made sense to do mini lunchbox cakes, since then we could have more cakes that way. One particular trend I have been…
Caviar Egg Tarts
Somewhat inspired by my trip to Oahu, where we ate at a restaurant called Senia. One of the dishes we were served were these egg tarts, which were savory, filled with an egg salad mixture, and topped with caviar. Now eggs and caviar are a classic combination. Eggs are custardy and rich, and caviar adds…
Freddy's Harajuku 