I had friends over for dinner tonight and I decided to make the first chocolate cake I’ve made since moving to Japan.  I have been making fruit cakes that involve a lot of preparation and thankfully the chocolate cake was much quicker to make.  One of my friends was concerned with my obsession for removing fat from cakes but this is one cake that really needs the butter.  It was moist, rich, and incredibly yummy.  It’s not something I would make all the time but it makes a great special occasion cake.

Chocolate Fudge Cake

I bought a copy of Mary Berry’s Baking Bible at the weekend and today I made the almond and chocolate chip cake.  It was incredibly easy to make, as all the ingredients are put in one bowl and mixed together, and it’s lovely.  Maybe a bit too lovely as I’m craving a second slice.

Learning to make new desserts is one of the objectives on my 101 list, but I can’t make too many cakes as that would be a disaster for my diet.  I also want my cakes to have less fat than the one I just made so the next time I make it I’m going to replace the butter with mashed bananas.

Now that I’m back home I’ve started baking again.  I wanted to make an apple sponge pudding but this is Japanese pear season and apples are hard to find.  I actually prefer pears to apples but I’m not really sure how to cook them.  I still struggle with the fact that fruit and vegetables in Tokyo are seasonal.  I know that this a good thing and that seasonal fruit has more nutrients but it causes problems when I want to bake.

I used Jamie Oliver’s Apple Sponge Pudding recipe only with pears.  I wasn’t overly pleased with the pudding.  The pears were fine, though they take longer to stew than apples.  But the sponge wasn’t spongy.  It reminded me of a pancake more than a sponge.  So, it was certainly good enough to eat but not what I wanted.  What I really wanted was the sponge that my friend made for me when I was in Holland (so maybe I should have taken down the recipe whilst he was baking.) Looks like I’m going to have to find some other recipes and try this again.

Tonight Marty made flapjacks.  They aren’t bad but they are too sweet.  Japanese desserts are never that sweet and we have become accustomed to eating things with less sugar in them.  The flapjacks do have potential.  I’m going to make them again but I’m going to replace the butter with a fruit puree, and remove nearly all the sugar.  I may add some honey for sweetness, but I’ll know better about that when I can actually taste the mixture.

It had to happen.  I had been so good only making low-calorie food in the oven.  But then one of my friends had something to celebrate and Black Forest Gateau is his favourite cake.  The chocolate sponge isn’t so bad but the cake is covered in a mountain of fresh cream.

Black Forest Gateau

Today I made another low-calorie cake. I wasn’t expecting it to taste so lemony but it’s still really good.

Italian Almond and Carrot Cake

“Bake a cake”, he said,  “It’ll be fun”.  It’s been years since I tried to bake a cake and I’d forgotten how much time it can take.  I used to make chocolate cakes, but I really don’t want all those extra calories in the house, so I decided to make something less fattening.

But before you can make a cake you need to shop for the ingredients.  It’s difficult to find the correct ingredients here.  I have been told that they don’t sell self raising flour in Japan.  This can be made from plain flour and baking soda but it adds an extra mixing and sieving phase when trying to get the baking soda evenly mixed through the flour.  I think I found the right type of sugar, but if nothing else it was the right colour.  Good fruit though is easy to buy, if a bit expensive.

After sieving and mixing the salt, flour, baking soda, and cinnamon I had to prepare the fruit.  I don’t appear to be very good at grating things.  The carrot was too hard and seemed to take forever, the apple was too mushy and I nearly put my hand through the grater.  The orange peel was the only thing that seemed to grate in the way I was expecting. The raisins were no problem at all as all I needed to do was weigh them.  The sugar needed mixed with oil and orange juice, which should have been easy, but I managed to squirt orange juice all over myself and the floor.

The cake didn’t look great before I put it in the oven, probably something to do with the carrots and raisins, but it did smell amazing.  Now that it’s out of the oven it looks fine.

Carrot, Apple, and Raisin Cake

Actually it tastes fine too.  Not sure I would describe the process as fun but I would make this again.

Yesterday I decided to use the new oven to cook dinner for friends.  This did mean that things probably seemed totally chaotic when they arrived at our apartment.  When cooking for other people I’m a great fan of dishes that can mostly be prepared the day before.  I’ve gotten used to making soups, curries, and stews.  I’m completely out of practice when it comes to using an oven.

I made chicken soup the day before for our starter, which was one thing less to worry about.  I wanted to cook turkey breast, stuffing, potatoes, and carrots in the oven.  Since the oven is quiet small we tried putting things into it earlier in the day and realised that there was no way that was all going to fit.  Instead of roasting the carrots I made honey and orange coated carrots in the crock pot.  I have gotten used to the crock pot so when it plays it’s weird little Japanese tune I know that the thing instead it really is cooked.  Pity I can’t say the same about the oven.

The roast potatoes cooked really fast.  The turkey breasts cooked really slow.  At one point it looked liked all the vegetables would be ready with nowhere to keep them warm.  I had this large bowl of colcannon that I was beginning to think might have to go in the crock pot with the carrots, which wasn’t a brilliant solution but I really didn’t want to dry it out on the stove.

In the end it all worked out and I did learn a few things about the oven.  It’s really hard to cook two things in it at once that aren’t going to finish at the same time.  It has one oven tray and a wire stand that sits over this.  So, when you take out the tray, the stand comes out too.  If your meat is on the tray there is no way to baste it without lifting out the stand, and in my case, the potatoes.  The oven loses heat really fast when the door is open so it’s not a good idea to open it and then realise that you haven’t got a clue how to unwrap the tinfoil around the meat so you can baste it.

Oven gloves would also be very useful.  I used to have these but we have no idea where they might be.  I’m hoping that somewhere I have an unpacked box containing ovenware.

I’m really glad that I had ordered Easter eggs and little Easter cakes from the U.K. for this dinner.  If I hadn’t I would probably have decided to bake a cake and that would have made the day a complete stress-fest.  As it was we had a bit of flapping around followed by a really nice meal.

I wasn’t able to find the right leaves to wrap the beef bulgogi in. I ended up buying a large salad cabbage. It seemed to work well though I think Marty got a bit carried away…

Beef Bulgogi Marty Style

Living in Japan can make it difficult for me to buy certain ingredients.  I try to find suitable substitutions, I use natural yoghurt instead of crème fraiche, milk soured with lemon instead of buttermilk.  But sometimes I can’t find what I need.  While I was chopping soup vegetables this morning I was thinking about how great it would be to be able to buy parsnip.  I have never seen a parsnip in Japan.  There are some other tuber like things in the supermarket but I have never bought them.

I’m not the only member of my family to make food substitutions.  My great-uncle used to make dinner for his mother, my great-grandmother, and he didn’t always have what he needed.  Apparently, if he didn’t have enough salad vegetables he would go out into the garden and pull up some weeds and substitute grass for spring onions.  I’m not planning on doing that with my soup but it didn’t seem to cause my family any harm.  So maybe I should just try cooking with some of the strange looking tubers in the supermarket and not worry so much about having the exact vegetable.

It’s not long after noon and already tonight’s dinner is simmering in the slow cooker.  Yesterday I made Jamie Oliver’s Beef and Ale Stew. It had a lot of flavour and I would definitely make it again.  I mostly followed the recipe but I had to change the ale.  The local supermarket is no longer selling cans of Guinness so I made do with a dark Ebisu stout. I don’t drink Guinness so I’ve no idea how similar the two things are but it was the best substitution I could find.

The only problem with the stew was that it made me think of British bar food and large chunky chips.  I don’t have anything to cook chips in and even if I did they don’t fall under my definition of healthy food.  But I couldn’t help thinking of how well they would have gone with that stew.