sakura roll cake

Over at Morino Café, a cake and coffee house in southern Takamatsu, they're serving up some delicious desserts and seasonal entrées. This being the sakura - cherry blossom - season, I'm seeing pink everywhere, and not just on the trees. Along with delicately patterned wagashi (Japanese confections) like daifuku and manju, cakes and even lattes have been put in pink to celebrate the season. And it's not only locals that catch the flower fever - The Starbucks uptown had sakura-flavored scones and macarons.

front - sakura roll cake, behind - matcha green tea roll cake at Morino Café

The roll cake wasn't nearly as sweet as I had imagined it would be, and this was quite a pleasant surprise. Light flavors in the sponge went very well with just a thin layer of pink whipped cream as a frosting, and they rolled the cake around the same frosting to create the filling, adding strawberries and the ubiquitous red adzuki beans.

Sakura flavoring, which can be bought as an essence, does have a unique flavor. The flavor is nothing like the flavor of cherries, and tastes somewhat like the smell of a flower mixed with lychee berries.


I do plan on talking about roll cakes more, since they are one of those versatile (one of my choice words, that) desserts that can be made easily and with lots of different results, by varying the filling. Roll 'em out!

mascarPOne (and caramelized balsamic pear)

Mascarpone is already fantastic on its own, just as it is. Still, having a few simple – yet elegant – recipes for it will make you feel fancier about yourself and raises your overall sexiness. Caramelized balsamic pears with mascarpone on crostini - this is one of those versatile entries that would be equally fit on a picnic, as an appetizer to a meal, or for a light dessert. 

The caramelization of the pears can be aided by sprinkling a handful of sugar over top. Of course you may consider peaches, nectarines, or apricots, but remember before caramelizing that you want to take out as much of the liquid as possible from the fruit. Caramelizing food, as with searing it, is a dry fry technique.

Caramelization, as it happens, is the reaction that occurs as water molecules are drawn out of sucrose through evaporation, and high temperatures are reached within the component sugars. You can caramelize something even if it’s juicy to start with, but you might end up with a syrup. And, since you’ll be burning off the water anyway, the process will be much quicker if you remove the excess liquids before putting it in the pan.

just get some color on that fruit

After drying out your fruit as best you can on paper towels, get your frying pan hot over medium / medium high heat. Place your fruit in the pan and let it cook for a bit, before pouring over your balsamic vinegar. As that begins to bubble away, sprinkle a bit of sugar (brown for sticky fruit!) over the fruit and turn them over.

You can sprinkle a bit more sugar here before turning them back over. They should start to become dark and syrupy. When you see that the sugar has melted and the fruit looks shiny, take the slices out and put them on a plate to cool. You can use them warm, or leave them in the refrigerator for nice chilled slices. The texture is quite different but delicious either way.

 
The mascarpone, as we have already confirmed, is good as it is, but let’s take it up a notch. Add either a bit of honey, Grand Marnier (or similar liqueur), or lemon juice to the cheese and stir until well blended. Toast your thinly cut bread, scrape some of the mascarpone mix over it, and finish by placing a couple slices of caramelized fruit on top – magnificent.

 

ichigo daifuku

it's not butter, but a traditional candy served with matcha

Today I attended a class in Japanese confectionery instructed by Mr. Suzuki of Shibayama Japanese Confectioneries in the city of Takamatsu. It was hosted in the commercial kitchen of their shop. The theme of the day was Ichigo Daikufu, which is an excellent dessert featuring fresh strawberries. Traditional Japanese cooking, including confectionery, cannot rely on ovens, and is mostly created in a pot over fire or with steam in specially made appliances. The confections at Shibayama are all handmade, focusing on seasonal flavors and traditional recipes.

Ichigo Daifuku (ichigo meaning strawberry, and daifuku meaning good fortune or “big luck” literally) is made by first encasing a whole ripe strawberry in anko red bean paste. This is then wrapped inside of a soft layer of dough made with mochi rice flour (a highly glutinous rice), water, sugar, and egg white whipped stiff. The wrapping is all done by hand and since the dough is extremely sticky, it’s very difficult to get the perfectly shaped balls that the pros produce.

strawberries, anko, and mochiko flour

The anko we used is only one of a variety of sweetened bean pastes that can be found in Japan. Shiroan for example, a white velvety variety, is made from lima beans. It may be strange to some palettes to think of mashed beans as dessert food, but sweetened beans can be found in many places all around Asia. 

Thinking about it though, even pork and beans tends to have an amount of sugar in it, so maybe it's not really that strange. Many beans have very neutral flavors and absorb the flavors around them well, so really they can go either direction towards savory or sweet. The beans used in making red anko are azuki (sometimes spelled adzuki) beans, with the largest growing region in Japan up north in Hokkaido.

 

the not-so-perfect result, but delicious!

Trying it out myself, the mostly difficult part was definitely wrapping the mochi dough around the inner core. It has to be done with speed, precision, and a soft touch – as the hot dough begins to cool, it becomes less flexible and harder to pinch together to finish the seam. And if things go wrong, they go wrong very quickly - that mochi rice can stick like hot glue. Suzuki-sensei described it as not pulling, which will tear the dough, but rather pinning it down with one hand and pushing with three fingers while working around the ball. The dough itself is made in a large rounded pot over a flame. First the mochiko flour and water are combined with sugar. Then, the mixture is poured into a large steaming machine and steamed so that the dough becomes super sticky. It is then returned to the pot, where the now heavy, thick mixture.is constantly stirred so as not to burn. The stiffened egg whites are folded in last.

Here are my rather imperfect results, which were none-the-less extremely delicious. I have developed a healthy appreciation for the pros, whose speed and accuracy in producing these perfect treats hides their years of acquired skill.

Me and Suzuki-sensei

Good times with strawberries! Oh as a last note, there is a variety strawberries of strawberries here known as Sanuki Hime - the Sanuki Princess strawberries - and they are excellent. Deep red and deeply sweet, this local berry is a real treasure. Bigger is not always better!

white day double-dip

the hardest part is not eating them

It's White Day here in Japan and for those not in the know that means a second round of Valentines-esque candy and gift giving. Whereas Valentines Day has girls giving their favorite boys (or office women their fascist bosses) chocolates, White Day is the day - held one month later on March 14th - when boys are supposed to give back. This year on Valentines, in defiance of gender and for the betterment of food practices in general, we had celebrated with chocolate cakes and brownies of various kinds given wantonly to both sexes. So for White Day, I decided to go with a more intimate, classic double-dipped strawberry. The white chocolate makes them legit for this holiday, I think, but I'm a little shaky on the rules. At any rate, Valentines and White Day must be a powerful incentive in Japan for buying chocolate - between these two holidays, Japanese chocolate manufacturers make fifty percent of their annual profits. Oh by the way, these were paired with an Asti Spumante, which went over very nicely.

bluffin' with my muffins

I wouldn’t usually talk about baking. Not that I don’t bake. Baking just seems to be more common knowledge to a lot of people, and there is lots of good information on cakes, cookies, pies and the like already - it makes me feel that adding my two cents won’t amount to much (although I guess it’s been a while since two cents amounted to much). Still, the mood strikes me every once and a while. Muffins!

Muffins are like sandwiches, or cookies, or bread itself – there are so many styles and types that it’s more of a category than it is a specific thing. What I want to share here is a simple – but effective – recipe that I’ve been using for a while as a base for other recipes. It’s crumby, soft, and buttery - somewhere in between a muffin, a cupcake, and a pound cake:

so crumbly

250g flour

150g sugar

1 egg

110g butter (melted)

lemon zest

200ml milk

1 tsp vanilla

Bakes 15 to 20 minutes at 190 C. Get a good bit of lemon zest. That really gives a fresh, delicious punch to the finished product. Also, consider other citrus for unique flavors: orange, grapefruit, lime. 

It’s fairly simple to leave it at that, but it’s the upgrade from a simple morning muffin into something approaching a dessert that will make this feel decadent – and we are going for decadence here. I mean come on, it’s a dessert. There’s no diet dessert in my book - the very fact that you’re eating dessert should jump you past worrying about calories (yeah, diet soda, I’m talking to you too).

If we slathered icing on top it would feel like a cupcake. We don’t want that: the post title clearly says “muffins”. Let’s attack it from the inside. Making some kind of pastry cream filling is not too difficult a task. Whipped cream is another easy substitute. This time though, we’ll do a mascarpone blueberry jam filling - because on top of managing to sound inspiringly fancy, it’s a breeze to make. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can always use the old cutting-a-corner-off-a-Ziploc-bag approach:

2 parts mascarpone cheese (you could use cream cheese)

1 part jam (went with blueberry this time)

Combine in a bowl until it's one cohesive color. Couldn’t be simpler. You could bulk it out with whipped cream if you need more (and don’t want to pay for the mascarpone). Pipe that in either through the top or bottom of the muffin, and enjoy!

can I truffle you for a drink?

With Valentines Day approaching, I have not-so-surprisingly had chocolate on my mind. There's probably nothing so perfectly balanced between decadent, elegant, and simple to make as are truffles. Better still, handmade truffles more faithfully fulfill their original intention than do perfectly-shaped machined ones. Chocolate truffles try to mimic their fungi counterparts - treasures dug up out of the dirt. The dusting of cocoa powder here represents the loamy fresh soil that you would have to dig through to find such a prize.

truffles try to look like they were just dug up like buried treasures

I make my truffles with this ganache recipe that I talked about a bit ago. Spread the ganache from that recipe thin into freezer-proof trays and put it in the freezer. This time the bain marie is unavoidable. Melt some dark high-cacao level chocolate – something sultry in the above 70 percent range – in a stainless steel bowl over a pan with hot simmering water in it. It’s important that the bowl doesn’t actually touch the water. Leave it there for a while and then give it a stir with a spoon. If it comes together it’s ready.

Roll the now chilled ganache into balls and drop these into the chocolate (might want to let it cool a bit, off the pan, first). One way is to use a melon baller, but I tend to find two spoons work pretty well. Pluck out the coated ganache balls with a toothpick and drop them into another small bowl of cacao powder, rolling the bowl around until completely coated. Pluck again and drop on wax paper, and let them chill in the freezer until set. These keep for a long time, and are stupidly delicious. For wine pairing, red or semi-sweet sparkling (like, not brut) works equally well, but I tip towards one or the other depending on the ganache flavoring. I recommend Chambord flavored ganache with merlot or another red wine that has sweetness and berry tones like malbec. With something like Grand Marnier, you might want to try an Asti Spumante or a semi-seco cava - wine with a little sweetness always goes nicely with chocolate. So easy, yet amazing!

chocolate ganache

The method that I use is extremely simple but also very effective, so give it a try. You'll want to have:

cream (whipping cream, heavy cream, double cream, whatever you know it as)

chocolate (the better the quality the better the flavor, but even Meiji bars work in a pinch)

*liqueur (optional but amazing as always)

So 2 or 3 ingredients. Can’t be too hard, right? Break your chocolate up into smallish pieces and leave them in a bowl (preferably metal). Pour over your liqueur if you’re using it. You could also use coffee. Heat the cream in a saucepan (low or medium heat, please) stirring so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom and die – if you have a nice thick bottomed pan this probably won’t happen though. When bubbles start, well, bubbling, around the outside edge, you’re almost ready. Give it a bit longer, so that it’s just started boiling, and pour it over the chocolate. Now, leave it be! Just for a minute or so, then you can stir it up. Use a spoon and stir until it goes from ugly duckling to molten chocomagic. If the cream wasn’t hot enough, and the chocolate doesn’t melt all the way, you have to do one of those annoying bain marie things where you put a metal bowl on top of a saucepot with hot water to cook it with steam heat. So, what I'm saying is, just make the cream hot enough the first time around.

Wait, how much cream and how much chocolate, you ask? Ganache is used for many things, from truffle cores to cake icings, so it’s not set in stone. I think an icing ganache is pretty nice when the cream is just enough to cover the chocolate pieces. A runnier ganache can be made with more cream, or a truffle ganache with less. Just try it out. Get a feel for it. I would say as a rule of thumb that it doesn’t take as much cream as I usually think it will.

For the liqueur, you only need enough so that the flavor comes through a bit. I use around a shot. Anything will work, including classics like Grand Marnier, or something fruity like Chambord, or nutty like amaretto. Split your chocolate up and try a sampling of different flavors for an elegant wine tasting time!