These cupcakes are meant to represent decadence and indulgence. One of my personal favorite combinations is dark chocolate with salted caramel, and these cupcakes take that combination, and really drive it home. In place of using just a regular caramel, I went with Cajeta. Cajeta is a Oaxacan goat milk caramel, very similar to dulce…
Tag: tapioca maltodextrin
Diglett Rocky Road Doughnuts
When I think back to Generation 1 of Pokémon, one of the funniest designs for me is Diglett. It’s supposed to be like a living whack-a-mole situation, and it looks like a brown bump with eyes, a pink nose-mouth-thing, and it is just sticking out of the ground. It apparently has legs and an actual…
Milkbar Buddy Honey Butter-Pear Crack Pie
Since Sam and I enjoyed doing our cake collab together so much, we figured we would venture into another Milkbar classic, this time being pies! Milkbar/crack pie is such a staple, and we wanted to do our own interpretation of it using some ingredients to bring in a more festive feel. Fun fact, the original…
Pistachio and EVOO Mimosa Cake
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…
“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….
Chrysalis: a plated dessert
During my senior year of college, I made a plated dessert called “Sanagi” – sanagi is the Japanese word for chrysalis, or cocoon. The dessert itself was matcha pate choux with spun sugar, made to resemble a little caterpillar crawling into a cocoon, hence the name of the dessert. I wanted to do a more…
Something New: a plated dessert
I’ve been meaning to make this dessert for ages. I stumbled upon baobab(an African superfood fruit that tastes like citrus) when I was doing research on natural food colorings, and I was too curious for my own good to not buy a bag of baobab powder from Amazon and try baking it with. I have…
Sweet snow: a layer cake
This cake was a labor of love. In that it took me two days just because of how much setting and dehydrating that needed to go into it. We have layers of fluffy strawberry chiffon cake(using some rice flour in it for an even lighter texture), strawberry leaf tea soak so the cake doesn’t go…
Freedom: a plated dessert
As with a lot of desserts I make, I named this particular one after a Miyu Irino song of the same name. It was this dynamic and fun song that emphasized standing up for what you believe in, and being free from the doubts in your mind. I also love that you cannot spell the…
Ruby chocolate-blood orange “Poosh” cake
So my sister had purchased a “Poosh” cake and I literally had no idea what is was until she did that. Apparently, it is a pink olive oil cake that the Kardashians endorsed, with the proceeds going to the Armenia relief fund, and it is extremely hard to come by. The completely pink cake itself…
Snow White’s Apple: a plated dessert
I really wanted to work with custard apple, also called cherimoya, and that’s where the inspiration came from for this dessert. Custard apple, as the name suggests, tastes like a creamy pear or apple. The catch is that it has tons of poisonous seeds in it that need to be removed. Ugh, me with inedible…
Summertime: a plated dessert
When I was conceptualizing this dessert, I wanted to focus on three specific ingredients, being peaches, blood orange, and olive oil. I have done olive oil desserts in the past, but most, if not basically all of them, featured an olive oil cake, or an olive oil gelato. So I decided to go a different…
Diamond dust: a petit gateau
When I was thinking of different, winter-themed desserts, I knew I had to do something with a reference to diamond dust. What diamond dust is, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is very light snowflakes that form and fall during clear skies. It’s very beautiful, and something I remember seeing on occasion…
All Right: a plated olive oil cake
This dessert was inspired by three things. The fennel pollen-olive oil cake that Kristen Kish never got to serve in her finale for Top Chef, Northern Californian olive oil my friend David gifted to me that has pleasant and fragrant grassy notes, and finally the song All Right by Koda Kumi, which ties in with…
My matcha dreamscape: a green tea-coconut layer cake
So before the cake replication challenge during MasterChef’s Sweet Week, we actually did get hints that we would be making a layer cake! So thinking we could make our own, I went ahead and thought up of a matcha and coconut layer cake. For the inspiration, I just imagined my trips to Taiwan and Japan,…
Stormy seas, clear skies tart
This was loosely inspired by a smoothie bowl aesthetic, but I wanted to that take and make a pie out of it. I don’t know. That’s just how I was feeling. There was something about round things being placed into swirly things that looks really cool. So I went ahead and made a purple ube…
Russian Honey-Bunny Cake
The Russian honey cake, called Medovik in Russian, is very similar to the American icebox cake. It is layers of wafers or cookies sandwiching layers of cream. In the case of Medovik, you use honey-infused cookie dough, made by caramelizing honey, whipping that into eggs and butter, and slowly adding in the flour, little by…
Miso chocolate cake with soy milk-black tea ice cream, sesame, and azuki jam
The inspiration for this dessert was Chinese New Years. The idea of a festive dish that embodies a lot of traditionally Asian flavors, namely the red beans and sesame. Red bean soup with black sesame-mochi balls is a traditional Chinese dessert, so this is a definite homage to that. The miso-chocolate cake really plays off…
Chocolate-Tangerine Creamsicle Cake
I love chocolate cake. I cannot stress or repeat it enough. But one of my favorite chocolate cake recipes is my fluffy fudge cake, which is made using bloomed cocoa powder, melted chocolate, and meringue, just to give the cake a dense, fudge-y start and a light, airy finish. Because yes, some cakes can have…
Sweet potato mont blanc
Mont blanc is traditionally a French dessert, featuring a puree of chestnut piped over whipped cream and topped with powdered sugar to resemble a snow-capped mountain; fun fact, mont blanc is French for white mountain. This dessert is popular in both France and Japan, and other varieties use sweet potatoes, shiro an or azuki beans…
Freddy's Harajuku 