I wanted to make these doughnuts for a couple of different reasons. The first was that eggs are getting really expensive/hard to find about now, I wanted to do some R&D with egg-free desserts, this being one of them. The second was that I was fondly reminiscing about my time at Boston University, and recalling…
Tag: toffee
Persimmon Sticky Toffee Pudding
These sticky toffee puddings are the love child of two Chinese ingredients(Chinese almond powder and persimmons) and a classic British dessert. Whenever the fall/winter rolls around, persimmons are abundant. And trust me when I say this, but having Chinese/Taiwanese family friends, I find myself rolling in persimmons every fall because I always know someone that…
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…
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…
Biscoff-Hazelnut-Brown Butter Cake
Back when I went to Berlin last December, one tasty little morsel we bought as a souvenir were these German hazelnut praline candies called “Toffiffee”. They were fun to stay out loud, a nightmare to type out, and were these caramel-nougat candies that contain chocolate and hazelnut. So in other words, delicious. However, we bought…
Brown Butter Toffee Chip Cookies
I occasionally love to dabble and adjust my cookie recipe, because I love how tweaking an ingredient or a technique in the recipe can result in dramatically different kinds of cookies. In the case of these cookies, I was trying to go with this super toasty, brown butter-forward cookie studded with chocolate, cacao nibs, and…
Acorn Sticky Toffee Puddings
This recipe came up because my friend and talented chef, Kesha Taro, and I were talking about acorn flour. Kesha worked for Gordon Ramsay doing culinary production for decades. She worked briefly on season 10, but I didn’t meet her until season 11 open casting calls, and she was super kind. Flash forward years later,…
Coconut-Caramel-Chocolate “Levain” Cookies
My sister loves the coconut delight Girls Scout cookies(formerly called Samoas before that was deemed a problematic name). When I went to the newly opened Levain bakery location in West Hollywood, we basically got one of every cookie on their menu(mostly to justify the 1 hour/30 mile drive to there). One of those cookies was…
Banana-Mixed Grains Tart
This recipe came about because I had a ton of super ripe bananas I needed to get rid of, and I wanted to get rid of these bananas in a somewhat extravagant fashion. I say somewhat because this tart has a decent amount of bells and whistles to it. Namely in the little craquelin choquettes…
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…
Sticky Miso Toffee Pudding with Cardamom Ice Cream
Sticky toffee or sticky date pudding is one of those desserts I grew to appreciate during my time in Boston. I once ordered this gingerbread sticky toffee pudding with brown butter, apples, and sage, and it was absolutely delicious! The combination of super soft, fluffy, brown sugary cake drowned in a rich butterscotch sauce was…
Fidough Box Cake
I have made many cakes in sake cups before. I just love the minimalistic aesthetic of a small wooden cake and when you scoop into it, there’s cake! The concept of this recipe is definitely inspired by the tiramisu from Cafe Bora, but since there is no coffee/tea or alcohol being used, it felt wrong…
Angelico: a plated dessert
I have really wanted to try tackling baba and hazelnut toffee tears, so I figured, why not combine the two together? Rum baba is a French and Italian classic. It is a yeast-leavened cake, similar to a brioche, that it soaked in a rum based syrup and stuffed with piped cream. With baba, you might…
Banana-salted caramel doughnut creams
I’ve finally settled on calling the doughnut entremet-things doughnut creams, mostly because it’s a lot easier to say. For this recipe, I opted for banana and salted caramel, nuanced with brown butter and walnuts. The layers for this cake are a brown butter-banana-nut cake, salted caramel bavarian cream, caramelized mirror glaze, salted caramel, and bruleed…
Butter-bourbon-pecan cake
This is a cake inspired by my co-worker, who is from Texas. Like this cake, she can be intense-looking and rough around the edges, but she’s genuinely a kindhearted person who wants you to do your best and live a happy life The cake itself takes her favorite ice cream flavor, butter-bourbon-pecan, and translates it…
Banoffee Sticky Buns
I love banoffee pie. For those of you who do not know what that is, it’s a British dessert consisting of shortcrust pastry, fresh bananas, dulce de leche (caramelized condensed milk), grated dark chocolate, and whipped cream. It’s pretty decadent, like a lot of British desserts (trust me, that’s not a bad thing. I personally…
S’mores panna cotta: a plated dessert
This dessert came about two summers ago when I was really bored. And I mean REALLY bored. Although that summer, I learned how to do a lot of things, specifically in terms of plating beautiful desserts and tackling ingredients I have never used before. The inspiration for the dessert came from a couple different things….
Wind chime in dirt: a plated dessert
I was inspired to make this dessert when I saw a Japanese wind chime, also called 江戸風鈴 (edo fuurin), just laying on my desk, and thought “maybe that would be fun to create a dessert from.” After deciding that I could replicate the entire wind chime using sugar for the glass dome and either white…
Freddy's Harajuku 