no matter where i'm at or how busy i've gotten, i always make it a point to make spring desserts. i love desserts associated with spring because of the beautiful colors and combinations. here i revisit a recipe that i made 4 years ago, the sakura white chocolate rare cheese dessert, with some slight tweaks. i remember this one being really popular with my readers and i got tons of people telling me how good it was. i wanted to go big initially ie. make an 8 inch one, or go real small. decided on the latter as i really wanted to use these cute square cups i bought recently. i think they look better than the round ones to be honest!


i also need to mention how much i love shopping at the dollar store recently. they've got tons of confections, snacks and chocolates not available at the mainstream grocery stores. in there i found tons of stuff, such as the bounty coconut chocolate, creme brulee and purple sweet potato kit kat, mint m&ms as well as these cheesecake flavored digestive/graham biscuits. i'm not usually a fan of grocery store cookies (i hate oreos), and the only kind i would eat are the lotus biscoff/speculoos, stroopwafels or the high end ones from marks & spencer, harrods or crabtree & evelyn so i was surprised i really liked these. the strawberry cheesecake flavored ones were pretty good, and i thought it would be great if i made the crust using these, cream and all. best decision i made so far. these were amazing! if you're familiar with japanese desserts rolled out during spring time, strawberry and sakura seem to be one of the more popular pairings - such as the sakura strawberry mont blanc so i'm not surprised it worked beautifully.


the dessert itself is as good as i remembered. even though this is a non-baked cheesecake, the use of egg yolk and white chocolate made it denser than the usual non-baked versions. some can be rather light on the palate, like the tofu cheesecake, but this is as close as you can get to a baked cheesecake, without the hassle of baking. the strawberry flavor from the crust is also quite prominent. and since i added the cream filling from the cookie as well, i only used half the butter. i also added slightly less sugar overall. since these cookies are smaller than the usual digestives, they're also easier to break apart so its win win situation all around.

for the recipe, head over to my entry from 2012, i linked it to the original recipe from cookpad.

i was supposed to make this entremet together with my friend A but due to conflicting schedules we were never able to make it. as you can probably tell, i hardly make entremets these days. everything seemed like a "been there, done that" for me. i mean, do i wanna make YET another berry entremet? nope. matcha, chocolate, hazelnut, pistachio? meh. right now, if i ever make one, i want to work with flavor combinations i've not tried before. this one is a good example. i have had pretty good results working with caramel (bergamote and hidemi sugino's bresilienne) so pear caramel seemed like a good flavor combination.


layers from bottom are hazelnut almond joconde sponge, caramel mousse, pear mousse, caramel liquid soaked pear compote. this one was really good, very light despite it has so much egg yolk in it. i always have tons of egg yolks left after macaron orders so this recipe is good for getting rid the leftovers.


this entremet is good because it doesn't require any seasonal ingredients. it uses canned pears so you can make it anytime. it also contains pear liqueur which i believe most of us will not have, so for the imbibage i just used the syrup from the can. this is also the 3rd recipe from chef koji yamamoto of patisserie planetes. i've tried making the fraise exotique and vanille rouge and they were awesome! recipe from cake chef.

the first half of 2014 went by in a blur. i felt that i haven't been baking much but looking back, i actually made tons of stuff. some of them were uploaded on flickr and forgotten but most of the time, i didn't bother using my DSLR so i just took some shots with my phone and uploaded them on instagram. here are some of the stuff i made + orders i took as well.


i had a couple of orders for japanese-inspired macarons. this is my first year making sakura ones and according to my customers, they were pretty well received. i guess the saltiness of the sakura flowers and leaves offset the sweetness of the macarons. i also experimented with jasmine flavored macarons. jasmine tea is dirt cheap so i had no qualms in dumping a whole lot of leaves in the cream. yay to pronounced jasmine flavor!

happy new year, guys! as you can see, i made this during christmas so its an overdue post. i wasn't planning on making something christmassy like a buche but i thought this looked like a tree so it was quite apt too! i also had these slanted-side tart tins for sometime now which i wanted to use for hidemi sugino's fig tart but i couldn't find any figs but i'm glad these had been put into good use.

wow ok, it must be eons ago (10 months, to be exact!) since i last made an entremet. i was afraid if i don't make one soon, i'll *really* forget how to do it. i was in a mood for something pink and pretty so i decided on a berry entremet. while no stranger to berry entremets (i've made countless - hidemi sugino's paradis, fruits rouges, sous bois etc), i've not made a sliced one like this so i was really looking forward to it.

it was mothers day yesterday, hope you guys had a great time celebrating the occasion! even though i did make a roll cake for our early celebration dinner last week, it was more like a cake i made for the mothers in my family and not for my mom herself so i really wanted to make her something personally. i recently discovered how to make a genoise properly and have had fantastic results from this recipe i used so i thought a shortcake would bring out the genoise nicely. my mom loves mangoes and even though i've not attempted this version i went ahead with it.

i made this for the family dinner on christmas and here's whats left of it. totally didn't get a chance to take any photos until after, and only posted it up 3 days after christmas as i'm still up to my neck with macaron orders. but i decided to share this afterall coz its really good and could be made into any shape and not just a log. the family really liked it and were all praises! took a while to do so many components but it was all worth it.

this is hidemi sugino's miss albion, a chocolate and mint mousse cake which i've made recently and clean forgotten about it. i've been really busy the past few weeks and before i knew it, i've neglected my blog for almost a month. got a few emails asking if i've decided to stop blogging. of course not!!

rouge means red in french and its just in time for some sprucing up on my blog. somehow i've been doing lotsa brown/yellow bakes lately (unintentionally actually) and i kinda miss working with berries and roses. did my usual rounds of checking out new entremets on my favorite website cakechef and came across this vibrant looking entremet.

this is the entremet i mentioned that it took me almost a month to complete. i usually complete my entremet within a day so this is the first (and hopefully the last time) i'm gonna do this. also, this is also the first time i'm using entremet recipe from a blog. when it comes to long and complicated recipes, i don't usually like taking them from blogs for fear that certain ingredients or steps would be missed out. i mean i'm guilty of it at times, not deliberately of course. sometimes i tend to overlook certain things, luckily it doesn't happen too often and my readers have always been kind (and forgiving) enough to point out my mistakes. anyway, i saw this recipe from dailydelicious' blog and it was so beautiful i just had to attempt it myself.

i was pretty excited about this entremet since i've never made entremets using half-sphere mold, neither have i tried red wine poached pears (i've only attempted poached pears with spices).

mother's day falls on the 13th which is just two days from now and i made this cake for the mothers in my maternal family (mom, grandma & aunt). i wanted something feminine and pretty hence i added some heart-shaped chocolate decor and tinted them pink. think it would be even better if i had some chocolate transfer sheets on hand.

for my mom's birthday this year, i made her a cheesecake. i was already researching on the entremet i wanted to make, only to hear her say "actually, i love cheesecakes" at the last minute and that really put me in a panic mode. in my 7+ years of baking i don't think i attempted much cheesecakes and i didn't wanna make something i hadn't made before. baking for occasions is just not the time for experimenting. hence i turned to something i made before in my very early days of when i started baking and had good results from it.

this is a white chocolate cheese dessert and biscuit base with sakura jelly. recipe can be found here.

if you've noticed, i made mont blanc using both chestnut and purple sweet potato before but this is by far my utmost favorite coz of its creaminess and delicate taste. all along i've wanted to make the pumpkin version but i was afraid my homemade pumpkin puree would be too watery for piping. i then chanced upon a method of roasting the pumpkin instead of the usual steaming (why didn't i think of that earlier!) so i wasted no time in making my favorite version of the mont blanc. this is the 2nd time i'm using a recipe from cakechef's website and armed with google translate and a little guessing game i managed to pull this one off!

i hope you're not tired of seeing yet another entremet on my blog! it was my friend's birthday last weekend so i made her a cake. i chose a simple one from one of my japanese pastry books and this is basically a white chocolate vanilla entremet with strawberry syrup-soaked almond biscuit sponge and macerated strawberries in spices.

when i bought hidemi sugino's book, this was one of the first entremets i wanted to try out - a coffee and caramel mousse cake but i ended putting off coz i couldn't find the right mousse rings. and when i managed to find the right one, it was the wrong size. was pretty dismayed coz it looked less elegant than his original masterpiece but oh well, this would have to do until i go hunt for the right ones in japan.

pretty excited about this coz its the 1st time i'm using oval molds for my entremets, attempted caramel glaze and also dabbled with a new ingredient - the buddha's hand citron or bushukan in japanese. the citron is pretty similar to lemon in taste and texture, the only funny thing is there isn't any pulp or seeds in there, just peel & pith. tastewise i find it sweeter and more aromatic than lemon and its easily my favorite citrus now.

hi guys, i'm back! for now at least :p today's my hubby's birthday and he really loves tropical flavors so i decided to make him something i came across a taiwanese pastry book. this is actually the 1st time i've made an entremet using something other than japanese and french books so i wasn't very confident about the outcome. true enough, i spotted quite a few mistakes along the way and this cake is a result of some major tweaking.

having bought a jar of griottes cherries recently, i have been waiting for an opportunity to make this, hidemi sugino's beautiful rendition of the forêt noire (black forest). i decided to do it for my birthday, which fell on the 7th. whenever it comes to making cakes for the extended family, i'll end up choosing chocolate since this is the most readily accepted one and i don't hv to worry whether they'll find matcha too weird or berries too tart if i were to make those flavors. everyone loves chocolate. having macaron orders back-to-back during my birthday week also meant there was just this much time to churn out a cake and this recipe is really one of the easier ones from sugino's book.