Financier Crumb Cakes

I came up with this recipe namely because I was craving financier, but I was also craving coffee cake. Coffee, or crumb, cake consists of this dense, rich cake that is usually made with sour cream, and lightly spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. It has streusel bits baked throughout it, which adds a pleasant crunch…

Midnight Snack: a petit gateau

I was craving a Hostess cake, and that literally was what inspired me making these. I specifically wanted a chocolate cake stuffed with a marshmallow, with a chocolate ganache glaze. So I figured, especially since I had a lot of spare egg whites lying around, that I could use one of the egg whites to…

Peanut Butter “Oreos”

One of my favorite cookies, Oreos are pure nostalgia for me. One of my early childhood memories was shortly after landing in Taipei, jetlagged, and eating Oreos with Taiwanese milk in our apartment in Linkou. I’m not sure if everyone knows this, but Oreos are actually vegan! I got my start in baking with vegan…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Fluffy buttermilk biscuits

I’m not going to lie and claim that I grew up making biscuits with my mother from scratch, or even talk about the first time I remember eating a biscuit, because I would be lying on both counts – we probably used the Pillsbury dough if we ever made them, and I really can’t remember…

Passionfruit chouquettes with passionfruit spun sugar

I made these chouquettes with a friend of mine, Sylvie, as a thank you for sowing up a couple of holes I had in one of my sleeveless hoodies, and one of my pairs of work pants. Sylvie loves passionfruit, and in exchange for agreeing to sow up my clothes like the talented seamstress that…

Tangerine and chocolate “snack cakes”

These were kind of my ode to a Hostess cupcake. A dark chocolate cake with a cream inside and ganache on top. Fudgy, delicious, and definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. For this rendition, I went with a chocolate cake that uses black cacao, which has this almost fruity quality to it from being an…

Crunchy mala-spiced popcorn

Whenever I go running, I always come up with really fun food ideas. I don’t know why, maybe it is because my body is craving certain kinds of foods while I am exercising, or the adrenaline is going to my head and it helps me think better or more creatively, but this recipe, regardless of…

Blonde chocolate and brown butter mochi Madeleines

I was really inspired to make these from my friend, Ann, who sells a lot of butter mochi products in her business, Pair of Pears. She does these really delicious and toothsome butter mochi doughnuts and brownies, and it made me garner a much larger appreciation for it. For those of you unfamiliar with it,…

Lemon meringue cookies

For my cooking mini-series with Lemonade(my friend Roshni’s social platform company), my co-host Marcin and I were actually tasked with making three different classes with three different themes. So we decided to go with ingredients, and to fit with the name of the company, we went with lemon dishes for the first class! For my…

Basque cheesecake with chocolate chip sable crust

Now I have been dying to make Basque cheesecake for quite a while now. For those of you who do not know what these are, they’re basically a Spanish-styled cheesecake which is airy and light at the edges, with a almost blackened, if not burnt top, and a gooey, creamy, and oozy center. They’re basically…

Black forest izba cake

Izba cake (Izba is Russian for “cottage”) is a Russian cake made of rolls of pastry stuffed with fruit, typically cherries, that are then layered with cream and allowed to set into a triangular prism shape. The cross section when you cut into it resembles a mini house, which is why it gets that name….

Chocolate bombolini cake

This dessert came about because I had a shit ton of ricotta cheese leftover, and I needed to use it. I wound up making cannoli cream, which is made with heavily whipped ricotta and chocolate chips. I figured that it would be the easiest way to use the ricotta, since I was not about to…

Coconut chiffon-Thai tea ice cream sandwiches

I just love Thai tea. It’s fragrant, refreshing, definitely artificially colored, but when made into an ice cream, it is delicious. Now I didn’t want to copy Milk in Los Angeles and make a macaron ice cream sandwich, but I still wanted to make an ice cream sandwich nonetheless. So that’s where the idea to…

Corn cookie and strawberry cheesecake sandwiches

These little cookie sandwiches were something I whipped up because every Friday at work, we always have these meetings for associates under the age of 30, and I like to bring something just to make the meetings a little more fun. I… was actually surprised by how well received these were! I knew that the flavor…

Black sesame oreos

Eating Oreos reminds me of whenever we would go to Taiwan; we would touch in the airport, typically in the middle of the night, and we would be hungry. The only places open nearby our apartment was a 7-11, so junk food was often what we ate to stave off our jet-lagged hunger. One memory…