December 8, 2021 In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets

Kahlua buns stuffed w/ mascarpone cream and salted pistacchio powder

Somewhere inside this cold hard exterior of mine, as hard as it is to admit, there's always been this fantasy of being the person who gives out home-baked panettone every year during the holiday season.  Not too early, not too late, just a couple gatherings after the first snowfall, the anticipation on the street would be, "Any day now."  It would be done right, gorgeous, plump, and permeating buttery decadent splendor that smells like long, scrutinized days in the kitchen.  It'll say

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October 15, 2021 In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets

Halloween spiral pastry stuffed with pumpkin and cheddar

It's always hard to entice someone to try, let alone spend time to cook something which they share utterly zero cultural or emotional connections with.  We are after all, creatures of habits and comforts, and both were properly brought up to not speak to strangers.  For this particular reason, one might even call it an excuse, I have been hiding from you one of my all-time favorite pastries. I'm obsessed with this stuff.  But what is it exactly?  Even nowadays when Asian is the new Italian culinarily speaking, It's still so foreign and

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March 15, 2021 In All recipes, Sweets

Chewy marshmallow nougat w/ cheese crackers and pistachio

"  It has just the right resistance, just the right gives, and just the right amount of crunches, dense and chewy yet airy and textural.  " [ezcol_1half] In case you're wondering why there's again a video instead of process photos, I'm actually thinking about experimenting with this new format from now on.  Based on feedbacks, videos seem to demonstrate the makings of the recipes much better than photos, and hence removing more fear and unfamiliarity from people who are trying to make them.  So I will keep doing it this way and see how it all goes.   So putting that aside, what we have here today is what I would like to call a marshmallow nougat, or marshmallow crisp, as some also call it, a snow crisp.  It is a very popular, well circulated, essentially a nougat-like candy bar of sort that's been making buzzes in Taiwan and Hong Kong's food-fad circles.  For someone who's not in the slightest bit into candy bars, even less so with nougats specifically, I too fell for its satisfyingly chewy texture with airy crunches from the crackers that are generously dispersed throughout.  But if you know what a snow crisp is and are wondering, "but wait, this

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October 14, 2020 In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets

Brûlée Coconut, Palm Sugar, Pork floss sticky buns

"  It's savoury-sweet kinda thing, you know, obviously, but also smokey around where a mixed aroma of coconut, butterscotch and bacon meet and greet.  " [ezcol_2third] What in the world is pork floss?! And where the hell do you get palm sugar?!  Or both, for that matter?! Ok fine, so I knew this is gonna be a hard pitch.  And I'm probably not helping my case when I tell you that pork floss, invented by an anonymous Chinese likely on a night of massive insomnia, is a brownish cotton ball made of predominantly pork, which is cooked, shredded, then painstakingly dehydrated while being tumble-fried inside a wok until what used to be muscle tissues have then transformed into super fine, fiber-like fluffs.  Whaaat?!  And as if that's not mind-bending enough, its flavor profile wonders in between savoury and sweet with a maple bacon or jerky-like porkiness oozing into your sensory space as your mouth grapple to understand this textural anomaly. It's really just like any other culinary ingenuities that took form initially as a means to tackle food preservation before refrigeration, but ended up being cherished by its culture even till this day.  Stretching from southern China down to Southeast Asia, hey, pork floss matters. 

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August 17, 2020 In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets, updated recipe

Failproof flakey pastry stuffed with mochi and chocolate

[ezcol_1fifth]-[/ezcol_1fifth] [ezcol_3fifth] Listen, I've made this flakey pastry about four times now.  And each time, no matter how every single signs along the way was pointing towards an inevitable heartbreaking disaster, somehow, miraculously, it always turned out amazing.  I've stuffed them with jam and cheese, with fruits and nuts, and this time, with bittersweet chocolate blended together with dark brown sugar and peanut butter plus a good chewy padding of sticky rice mochi on the bottom, and still I couldn't manage to fuck it up.  More crispy and shards-like than puff pastry, but more defined and layered than pie crust, comes together fast and relatively easy, and goes down even more so. So, as someone with a very unlucky track record in the baking arena, I pass this recipe onto you.  I'd say good luck, but something tells me you won't need very much of it. [/ezcol_3fifth] [ezcol_1fifth_end][/ezcol_1fifth_end] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third_end][/ezcol_1third_end] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third_end][/ezcol_1third_end] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third_end][/ezcol_1third_end] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third_end][/ezcol_1third_end] [ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end][/ezcol_1half_end] [ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end][/ezcol_1half_end] [ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end][/ezcol_1half_end] [ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end][/ezcol_1half_end] HERE A VIDEO DEMO ON HOW TO MAKE THE PASTRY (WITH A DIFFERENT STUFFING): https://youtu.be/z3vCW0XtL7Y *UPDATE 2021/01/01:  The amount of butter is changed. *UPDATE 2022/01/21:  For the dough, I added 1 1/2 tbsp of canola oil to make it softer and cripsier.   [amd-zlrecipe-recipe:217]

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May 21, 2020 In All recipes, Sweets

Glazed Tadpole-oca donuts w/ salted peanut dust

[ezcol_1half] Publishing a recipe that is aimed at overtaking an old one on a recipe blog like this, is a bit of a dangerous rabbit hole to fall down in. For starter, it implies that the old recipe being replaced, however satisfactory it was left for the public consumption in good faith, was after all, only subpar in comparison.  An uncomfortable admission that these recipes, or at least some of them, are only as good as the limits of their developers at the time whose standards may at some point surpass their own creations.  That some recipes are ultimately, imperfect and transitory.  Which then leads to the question that, well, if one recipe here is found to be less than worthy of eternity, or at least till the end of mankind due to disasters of cosmic proportions, then who knows how many other recipes here are potentially shy of such basic standard?  Because if this isn't the promised space that guarantees unequivocally immaculate cooking manuals that fill the empty pockets of our blip of an existence in a totally indifferent no-shit-given universe, then what are any of us even doing here?  What's the point?  I mean do you know?  Does she know?! 

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October 30, 2019 In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Dairy, Sweets

Japanese melty iceboox cheesecake

[ezcol_1fifth]-[/ezcol_1fifth] [ezcol_3fifth] I'm sitting here, struggling with how best to explain to you all why this Japanese version of the burnt basque cheesecake is superior than the original in every single way possible, mentally auditioning all the angles I could cut into this subject that I think is going to change the way you think about cheesecakes in general.  How it's possibly the easiest cheesecake your kitchen-incompetence will ever behold

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