I came up with this dish because I was thinking about what the prettiest duck dish I could make, and this is what I thought up of. I love to tea smoke proteins, and I love tea smoked duck. Smoking the duck in chamomile tea specifically gives it a pleasant earthiness, and I wanted to…
Tag: recipe
Mango lassi mille feuille
So with this dessert, I wanted to combine Indian flavors with Albanian and French techniques. For the pastry, I went with a homemade phyllo, brushed with ghee just to guarantee that beautiful browning on the dough. With the filling, I did a yogurt and cardamom namelaka, which is a ganache that is whipped. For this…
Roasted cornish hen with umami rice cabbage roll
I really came up with this dish because I wanted to do a cornish hen dish for a while, but was not fully sure where to go with it, initially. I wanted to do something a little European, but obviously a little Asian as well, and that’s how I came to the dish I came…
Incan gold cookies
I don’t even know why I didn’t think about making these cookies the first time I ever used lucuma. It just makes so much sense, especially since corn is such a huge part of Peruvian cuisine, and lucuma, being a fruit that tastes exactly like caramel, would compliment that so perfectly! For these cookies, I…
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,…
Strawberry tiramisu
So I have made many a strawberry tiramisu in the past. Ever since I was a student in college, I just loved the idea of making tiramisu that were not traditionally flavored. Ever since I moved back to Los Angeles, I fell in love with the aesthetic of the tiramisu at Cafe Bora in Koreatown,…
Milk bread gua bao
So I had been reading the Mr. Jiu’s cookbook recently, and something that inspired me was seeing them take milk bread dough and turning that into buns. I have done something like that before with my “Fred bread”, but seeing it done by a restaurant that I really look up to just validates my decisions…
Oatmeal (Rum) Raisin Icebox Cake
So I have feelings about oatmeal raisin cookies. Mostly of disappointment because it looks like a chocolate chip cookie from afar, and when you bite into it and realize that you have been deprived of your chocolate experience, only for it to be replaced with dried fruit, it’s infuriating. That being said, I wanted to…
Yuzu-white chocolate-macadamia pound cakes
I actually grew up eating tons of pound cake, but never really making it from scratch. I honestly did not even realize that what makes pound cake so unique is that while it is an American-style cake batter, it does not use any leavening! Typically, you would see French and European sponge cakes use eggs…
Dango with black rice pudding and salted rice milk
I love mango sticky rice. The stewed down rice with salty coconut milk and juicy mango, it’s a fun combination to play around with. For this particular recipe, I wanted to accentuate that classic Asian dessert by doing rice three ways, and mango two ways. For the rice, I used black rice and did a…
Cutie Honey Scoop Cakes
Originally, these were going to be honey tiramisu, but I felt like the term “scoop cake” just sounded a lot more cute and fun. So we’re going with that description instead. With these little cakes, we have layers of bee pollen infused castella(Portuguese/Japanese honey cake), chamomile tea and gelee, honey-bee pollen infused quark(German cheese yogurt),…
Roasted cabbage with pork belly and mushroom dashi
So this is a dish inspired directly from mille feuille nabe. I wanted to do a dish that featured layers of roasted cabbage and pork in an umami-rich mushroom broth. I could imagine these soft, tender layers of cabbage that are steamed with the rendered pork fat from the belly slices between each leaf, sponging…
Rainbow Carrot Cake
I have been putting off making this cake for quite a while. Mostly because I was lazy. The concept of taking rainbow carrots and individually highlighting them sounded like a ton of fun, and it would make for a cute and pretty cake. However, the execution of it sounded like a tall task. I wanted…
Scallion pancakes with braised oxtail and bone broth
So I was inspired by birria tacos, but knowing that I cannot make them authentically, I figured, why not take dishes and ingredients from my own culture, but just serve them in the same fashion? So I took the concept of a wrap with a dipping broth, and essentially made it Chinese/Taiwanese. I still remember…
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…
Thai Tea-Milk Bread Sticky Buns
So this recipe only came about because I had a ton of Thai tea powder, and I had to get rid of it somehow. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas, like macarons, panna cotta, ice cream, basque cheesecake, and pound cake, but then I realized it had been a while since I made anything with…
“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….
Matcha and cream roll cake
So I actually made this cake for my mom’s birthday, but I figured that the green color just made it perfect for St. Patrick’s and March, so I held off on posting it until then. The unique thing about this roll cake compared to other ones I have done in the past is that the…
Chocolate-chestnut-matcha entremet
I was mostly inspired to make this because I wanted to make a really woody and vibrant-green dessert. Mostly because with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I had to get together as many green, Irish, beer, or gold-themed dessert ideas together as possible. So this would be one of them. For my components, we have…
Vegan Milkbar Birthday Cake
So I did a rendition on this particular Milkbar cake years ago(ironically before I even worked at Milkbar). But I wanted to do a more true version of the original cake, this time making it 100% vegan. The beauty of it is that you cannot even tell that the cake is vegan! It looks exactly…
Freddy's Harajuku 