Desserts Inspired by The World of Hayao Miyazaki

I have been in love with the stories, worlds, and characters of Miyazaki’s movies since I was a kid. This is a project I began in the summer of 2019- it had been about a year since my life-changing trip to Japan where I finally got to visit the famed Ghibli Museum, and I was pining to go back to Japan, while working long hours as a pastry chef in Queens, NYC. My favorite medium as a pastry chef has always been pie crust; I love cutting out shapes to depict images of things I love and to see how it’ll look when it comes out of the oven. Here are a handful of before and after pictures from the projects, and the flavors of each and the movie they’re from are listed below:

• Blueberry Totoro Pie (My Neighbor Totoro)

• Plum Frangipane Kodama Pie (Princess Mononoke)

• Blackberry No-Face Pie (Spirited Away)

• Salted Maple Robot Pie (Laputa: Castle In The Sky)

• Chocolate Pudding and Shortbread Kiki Pie (Kiki’s Delivery Service)

• Coconut Macaroon Soot Sprites (My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away)