During the pandemic, one of my absolute favorite “inventions” was this roasted miso and hojicha sugar, made by toasting sencha green tea leaves and miso paste in the oven, then blitzing them with sugar to form a fine powder. That powder is delicious as a coating for a doughnut(which is what it was originally intended…
Tag: recipe
Yakult and Pineberry Roll Cake
When I first heard about pineberries from my coworker Georgina, I just knew I had to use them in something. Pineberries are albino strawberries that supposedly taste like pineapples – truthfully, they just tasted like tart strawberries to me, but that was fine either way, because I really wanted to use them for their beautiful…
Rowlet Inarizushi
When I was a kid who did not like raw fish yet, I found myself ordering only three things whenever we would go out for sushi: cucumber rolls, tamagoyaki(Japanese omelet), and inarizushi. Inari refers to these puffed tofu skins that are based in a sweet soy mixture, giving them a sweet, smoky, and almost salty…
Chocolate-Caramel-Sea Salt Cookies
These cookies were a hilarious experiment. I love aging my cookie dough by a few days just so that the exterior of the cookies get really crispy. For these cookies, I did that same technique, but because I also substituted the eggs with sourdough. From a baking standpoint, eggs provide protein to bind doughs and…
You’re my superstar: a geode cake
I’ve made so many galaxy cakes over the years. I just love the aesthetic of stars and constellations! For this specific recipe, I wanted to decorate it with konpeitou, which are these really pretty rock candies that come in different colors. They look like the star bits from Super Mario Galaxy and they are just…
Ube-coconut cupcakes
Now I did a layer cake with ube and coconut recently. But before anyone tries to tell me that I am double-dipping, there are some differences between the two recipes, beyond one being cupcakes and the other being a layer cake. The first is that the layer cake gets a soak. The second is that…
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…
Chocolate Fraisier Cake
Now I have done Fraisier cakes in the past. What I love is the appearance, being this perfectly cylindrical cake with slices of strawberries peeking out from the cream that the layers of sponge are sandwiching. For this rendition, I wanted to go with a chocolate-ish version of it, featuring a fluffy black cacao sponge,…
Lemon-Thyme “Rainbow” Tart
For Pride this year, I waned to go with a bit more of a whimsical take on rainbows. When I think of rainbows, immediately I think of light and water. Since you know, the two work together to create a rainbow! So for the light side of things, I went with a lemon-thyme curd tart,…
POG Jelly with Passionfruit
I was inspired by Taiwanese grass jelly when making this dessert. Grass jelly is an Asian dessert that consists of these dark brown cubes of jelly that are flavored with mesona chinensis leaves(the jelly basically tastes like a pleasant black tea with grassier notes). Usually grass jelly is topped with sweet braised peanuts and tang…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Freddy's Harajuku 