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…
Tag: pastry
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…
Chocolate-Coffee Layer cake
This cake is basically a chocolate and coffee lover’s dream. Layers of dark chocolate cake with an Ovaltine latte soak, whipped chocolate ganache, a chocolate cookie crumb, cocoa-coffee French buttercream, and coffee tuiles. With each layer, I wanted to make sure they all brought different forms or textures of chocolate or coffee. We have the…
Coconut Sago with Yuzu and Milk Jellies
One of my earliest childhood memories was eating at this Chinese restaurant with my parents and being served a bowl of sago pudding for dessert. The tapioca pearls were swimming in this sweet coconut milk-based dessert soup-type of thing, which had bits of seaweed in there as well! That was the baseline inspiration for this…
Hojicha-red bean-mochi madeleines
I made these madeleines half because I wanted to test out a few hojicha recipes, and half because I also made red bean paste using a pressure cooker, and I had to use it somehow! What I love about madeleines are that they are super customizable – since they are these cute, seashell-like cookie-cakes, they…
Violet Ohagi
So this recipe came about because I had a lot of red bean paste, and I had to use it up somehow. One of the first things that came to mind when I was trying to figure out what to do with the red bean paste was ohagi. Ohagi is a type of Japanese wagashi(confection)…
Yuzu-Castella Strawberry Shortcake
One of my favorite childhood memories growing up was coming back from a long day at school, and being greeted by my mom with some sort of baked good from the local Taiwanese bakery. Sometimes it was cheesecake, other times, mont blanc, but one particular favorite of mine is castella. Castella is a fluffy sponge…
Pineapple Cake Madeleines
Weirdly enough, I haven’t really done anything inspired by Taiwanese pineapple cake, basically ever. Part of it stems from the fact that cooking with pineapples are a pain in the butt – cutting them up takes forever, they have too much water to cook out, and the fibrous texture is not the most pleasant to…
Pink velvet cupcakes with basque cheesecake mousseline
This recipe came up from a cake order, actually! The client was requesting pink velvet cupcakes for a Hollywood-type of party, so I wanted to try my best and embody a sort of glamorous and cute aesthetic. When it came to the cakes, I knew that I could do this super fluffy cake with pink…
Marge and in Charge: a petit gateau
When coming up with this recipe, I had a random epiphany that piping something like a mont blanc could cause it to resemble Marge Simpson’s hair. That and this idea came to me about two weeks prior to Mother’s Day, so I felt like that was a weird coincidence, and that I should just run…
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…
Blueberry-goat cheese financiers
I love financier. And not just because I worked in finance and therefore am a bit of a financier myself! They are French almond and brown butter spongecakes that are just delightful to eat and fun to make. The name for them, in theory, comes from the fact that the cakes resemble bars of gold,…
Rippled hazelnut and coffee brownies
These brownies came about because I was really craving something crunchy, fudgey, and rich. I had quite a bit of leftover ingredients and prep from a variety of other recipes I had made, and I kind of wanted to find a productive way to use them all. And that was really how these brownies came…
Ube-coconut layer cake
It had been a minute since I made an ube dessert, so I wanted to try another rendition, this time with a chiffon cake! Ube, for those unfamiliar, is a Filipino purple yam that is commonly used in desserts there. It does not grow naturally in America, so the best options you have for it…
Vegan and gluten-free pecan praline brownie sundae
I came up with this recipe because I wanted to see how challenging it would be to make a dessert that is both gluten-free and vegan. I wanted to take the most decadent, self-indulgent dessert, being a brownie sundae, and make it 100% free of animal products and gluten. Truthfully, making a vegan and gluten-free…
Chocolate-Whiskey-Tangerine Mousse Cake
My family friend was kind enough to gift me with their homegrown tangerines, something that I look forward to every spring. For this year, I wanted to go back to a project I did years back, which is recreating Lady M desserts in my own way. This time, I went with their Whisky Dark Chocolate…
White Bunny Carrot Cakes
So when it comes to Easter, I don’t really celebrate it. Growing up in a Buddhist household, Easter as a holiday just meant that time of year when there’s lots of rabbits, ducks, marshmallows, polka dots, colorful eggs, and randomly, jellybeans. That’s literally all Easter means to me to be honest. With that in mind,…
Lemon-Blueberry Gateau Breton Tart
So this dessert was initially meant to be like a 2.0 version of a lapis lazuli tart I made YEARS ago. But I knew I had to do a few things differently this time around. The first is the tart shell. Instead of just doing a pastry in a tart tin, I went with a…
Chocolate chip-cookie butter cupcakes
This recipe primarily came about because I was craving cookie dough ice cream, and I happened to still have a jar of Speculoos cookie butter lying around. So I figured, why not make a cupcake that was chocolate chip cookie-flavored? I would make a cake with brown sugar, brown butter, and chocolate chips, just to…
Shaymin Nerikiri
I would be lying if I said this recipe was easy. Namely because it took me 4 hours from start to finish. A lot of it, not going to lie, is just the amount of time it took perfecting the color and shape of these little nuggets. That and I tried to make a half-batch…