Whenever I think of my friend, Ellie, I think about how wonderful of a person she is. We have known each other since elementary school, became friends in middle school, sort of grew into different cliques in high school, but when we both went to college in Boston(her Boston College, me Boston University), our friendship…
Tag: recipe
Toffee Chip Brown Butter Cookies
Brown butter cookies are a pain to make because typically with a cookie dough, you want the butter to be chilled so that the dough can be firm, easy to work with, and to keep the cookies from spreading excessively/the fat from leaking out of the cookies themselves. With browning butter, you are melting down…
Levain Chocolate-Toffee Cookies
I still remember the first time I had a Levain cookie. It was on one of my solo trips to New York City. Back in college, once a semester, I used to go to New York and basically eat at every single well-known bakery and dessert spot I could get my hands on. I still…
Cherry Garcia Shortbreads
Whenever I had baker’s block and am struggling to think of new dessert ideas, one thing I can always fall back on is ice cream flavors! I find that focusing on specific flavors or ingredients, and what I enjoy about those in the ice cream itself, is a great starting point for a new dessert…
Streusel mit Pudding Brioche
This dessert was directly inspired by my visits to the German Christmas markets – if you have never been or don’t understand the hype, imagine the Disneyland Ride “It’s a Small World”, but that’s what an entire square in Germany becomes during late November/all of December. It is a wonderful sight to behold, and one…
White Chocolate Mille Feuille
This recipe came about because I was randomly in the mood to make puff pastry from scratch. There are just those random days where I want a challenge, and making puff pastry is definitely one of those. Puff pastry is a kind of laminated dough, meaning you are folding butter and dough together to create…
Ajitama Onigiri
This recipe is inspired by an onigiri I saw when I was traveling in Japan earlier this February. We were staying in Shinjuku, and had about 4 days(including travel) to explore Tokyo. While we were at Tokyo Skytree, there was an onigiri store in the department store, and I saw this onigiri that was triangular…
Wintermelon Assam Milk Tea Cream Puffs
Wintermelon has become an ingredient I am more and more familiar with as of 2024 – I have used it in mooncakes, milk teas, and now cream puffs! What I love about wintermelon is that it is nostalgic – my mom would make wintermelon tea for us growing up, which was just wintermelon cooked down…
Kakuni(Japanese braised pork)
Kakuni is a Japanese dish consisting of braised cubes of pork belly in this sweet soy-based broth, usually served with a braised egg and mustard. I came to really love this dish over the past year, when I first had it at a Japanese restaurant in Torrance, then again almost a week later when I…
Sourdough Shio Pan
Shio pan(or salt bread) is one of those Japanese pastries that I had a more recent relationship with, but one that I adore greatly. Soft, fluffy, vaguely croissant-shaped bread with a salty flavor, this was a great concept for me to use Horacio, my sourdough starter, in. Unlike with my previous shio pan recipe, this…
Maple Pumpkin Pie
I have had this recipe on my to-bake list since the spring; I have a weird relationship with pumpkin pie where growing up, all of the pumpkin pies I ate tasted like cinnamon-caked cardboard in a pie crust. And it was a shame because on so many of the cartoons I grew watching, pumpkin pie…
Pork Loin with Fennel, Green Apple, and Potato
This is like the most quintessential meat and three veg-type of dish I am putting on my blog. Mostly because it is homey and comforting, but I wanted to plate it in a more elegant and whimsical way. I wanted to do another pork loin dish, but in terms of what I wanted to pair…
Vegan Apple-Tanghulu Doughnuts
These doughnuts came about because I had a bunch of apples I needed to use from apple picking with my friends(fun fact, it’s been a running 5 year tradition that my friends and I drive 2 hours to a city called Oak Glen, and we pick apples there for fun in the fall). Whenever we…
Gyutan (Beef Tongue) Doria
Doria is a Japanese rice gratin, consisting of steamed rice with a white sauce or cheese poured over it and the entire thing is then broiled until golden-brown. I truthfully never had doria until this year, and that is a HUGE shock to me, given that I’ve been to Japan over 5 times, lived there…
Chocolate Olive Oil Cupcakes
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for cupcakes, since I learned how to bake through watching Cupcake Wars way back in the day on the Food Network. Not going to lie, I always dreamed about going on that show, but I guess being on two seasons of Masterchef and ironically still…
Sourdough Garlic Cream Buns
One of the many triumphs in my sourdough experiments were these sourdough garlic cream buns. This recipe was directly inspired by both the everything milk buns that were occasionally sold at EatDomi and the trending bloom bagel. In both cases, it is a round piece of bread that it cut to have wedges on top,…
Beef Moussaka
This recipe came about because I had a bunch of leftover potatoes, and I happened to purchase some graffiti eggplant the other day. Graffiti eggplant is just an eggplant that has a striped white and purple skin. Besides that, it literally tastes the same, and is just another eggplant, aka perfect to cook in a…
Litwick Carrot Cakes
Making these little Litwick carrot cakes was an interesting process. Originally, I was going to bake carrot cake batter in cookie shot molds, and then stuff those with a lot of fun fillings, and decorate the exterior of the cakes to resemble little Litwicks. Litwicks, for those unfamiliar with them, are a Pokemon that is…
Salted Caramel “Black Thunder” Bars
I don’t know how I went as long as I have without ever eating a Black Thunder cookie bar. These popular Japanese candy bars consist of a black cacao cookie with crunchy rice and a chocolate coating. They are texturally addictive, and I can only assume that the name “Black Thunder” refers to both the…
Dubai Chocolate Muffins
I have been toying around with Dubai chocolate-flavored things, because chocolate-pistachio is one of my favorite flavor combinations. The chocolate bar is stuffed with a mixture of pistachio cream and toasted kataifi(shredded phyllo dough), which is a loose homage to knafeh, a Middle Eastern dessert that uses those ingredients. Smoky, salty, crunchy, creamy, bitter, and…
Freddy's Harajuku 