Last weekend Marty decided to take me away for a belated birthday celebration.  I ended up in the Four Seasons eating afternoon tea while dressed in ripped jeans and a faded conference t-shirt.  I was adequately dressed for the walk we took in a Japanese garden but in no way prepared for dining amongst ladies who lunch.  There were even people wearing traditional kimonos, though I imagine they were part of the many weddings taking place in the grounds of the hotel.

My sister asked me today if they put us in a corner.  She was right, we were seated in a corner and hidden from the view of passers by.  It hadn’t thought about it but it had happened to her when she visited an expensive tea house in Tokyo.  But then not only was she wearing casual clothing, she had also managed to cover herself in mud after falling in the gardens.  I wasn’t covered in mud, but I was rather hot and sticky.

Once the afternoon tea arrived my concerns about my outfit were quickly forgotten.

Afternoon Tea

I don’t know much about pumpkins and squash.  (I can’t even work out if the plural of squash should be squashes.) Today I saw a vegetable in the supermarket called “kabocha” that looked like a pumpkin.  It was cut into pieces and had dark green skin with a bright orange centre.  I have a recipe for mini chocolate cupcakes that is supposed to be made with butternut squash.  I was fairly sure that “kabocha” wasn’t a butternut squash but I bought it anyway as I imagined that I could make the cupcakes even if the squash was different.

The cakes are moist and the change of squash hasn’t caused a problem.  They are a little too bitter and I think that next time I need to use chocolate the isn’t quite as dark.  I also need to even out the cakes before I put them in the oven as they came out in odd shapes.  I was expecting them to melt and become smooth, but I was wrong.

Mini Chocolate Cupcakes

I like to bake but I need to be careful not to eat too much.  I have been trying to find ways to make cakes that are both healthy and tasty.  I have discovered that some low-fat or low-calorie recipes rely on bad food substitutions that I want to avoid.  I wouldn’t consider replacing butter with margarine – but I will replace it with apples or even aubergines.

Baking with fruit and vegetables is time consuming.  There is a lot more grating, beating, and whisking than I would like.  So far though the results have been worth the extra effort.  This week I have been experimenting with recipes from “Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache“.

I made “Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes” with carrots and ground almonds.  I also used rice flour for the first time.  I will admit that the cake mixture looked all wrong in the bowl.  It was gloopier than I expected and I was worried that it was too heavy.  But the cakes were beautiful.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

At the minute the room smells of toasted coconut as I am making coconut cupcakes. This time I have used aubergine instead of butter. I didn’t like the consistency of the cake mixture and I thought that grated aubergine looked quite yucky, but I suppose the proof with be in the eating.

Coconut Cupcake with Coconut Cream Cheese Frosting

The cupcakes are good. Marty is now eating his third one. I can’t taste the aubergine and I’m impressed with how moist the cake is. The frosting was based on a Jamie Oliver recipe for lime cream cheese frosting, I simply replaced the zest with coconut and the lime juice with coconut milk.

Given how often I write about food you won’t be surprised to learn that there are loads of things that I want to eat in Japan but can’t.  Ovid was writing today about things that he craves, and gives a recipe for something called rice-a-roni.  I have never eaten that, or even heard of it before I read his post, but I have certainly spent quite a bit of time this year learning to cook things that I crave and have learnt how to substitute food.  Only yesterday I made a Shepherd’s Pie with minced pork instead of minced lamb.  I think Marty called it a “pig herder’s pie”.

Sometimes though a substitution won’t do.  I wanted to have roast parsnips with our Christmas dinner.  I had managed to find a small turkey, ham, and frozen sprouts at an online butcher but I was craving parsnips.  I tried researching this online and came across tales of people growing their own but that wasn’t something I was going to be able to do before Christmas.  I thought that I might be able to find these at the Costco in Saitama.  So we hired a car and went on a parsnip hunting adventure, but there were no parsnips.  I did manage to buy baby carrots, a box of potatoes, and some Quaker’s Oats.  (Potatoes are normally sold in packets of 3 or 4 in Japan so being able to buy a box of them that weighed 7 pounds was fairly amazing.)

Then, whilst at a housewarming party, someone else started to talk about parsnips.  They claimed that I could buy them at Nissin World Delicatessen in Azabu-juban.  I have shopped there before and have never seen a parsnip but fruit and vegetables are seasonal and it’s certainly the right type of shop to buy something like a parsnip.  Alas, there were no parsnips. The shopping trip wasn’t wasted as I bought sweet mince, caster sugar, and Walker’s shortbread.

I had to give up on having roasted parsnips as part of my Christmas dinner but I was happy enough as this was the first time we managed to cook a turkey in Japan.  2010 might officially be the year of the tiger but for me it was undoubtedly the year of the oven.

Christmas Dinner

Christmas is strange in Japan.  It’s not a holiday and it’s not celebrated in any religious way but it’s still well known.  It reminds me a bit of Valentine’s Day only with Christmas symbols and elevator music.  I found it difficult walking around the local supermarket as it sounded as if a tribe of smurfs had been let loose to sing bad Christmas music.  It may not have been so bad if they had only played one song at a time but they have a fondness for placing CD players in different parts of the store so each section can have its own competing music.

Christmas food exists, though it’s not turkey and ham.  There is a Japanese Christmas cake, which is a light sponge covered in cream and strawberries.  And then there is Christmas fast food.  Mos Burger runs an X-mos burger campaign but this pales compared to KFC’s Christmas food.  KFC has its own version of Christmas dinner with party buckets and roast chicken.  We had friends staying for Christmas and thought it would be fun to have KFC on Christmas Eve.  We had to book this weeks in advance and even then there was only one free time slot.  Over Christmas KFC doesn’t sell its usual food in the evenings but opens for collections of pre-ordered Christmas dinner.

We ordered an eight piece party bucket and a roast chicken.  The chicken was surprisingly good though the gravy was a little strange.

KFC Roast Chicken for Christmas

Even though I found it time consuming making festive biscuits I decided last night that it might be fun to make gingerbread men.   Actually I decided I could teach Marty how to make them.  Once I taught him how to rub butter into the flour he was able to make the dough and was successful baking his first batch.  It’s much easier making biscuits when you get someone else to do it for you.

Evil Gingerbread Army

After my success with baking cakes I thought I would try making festive biscuits.  That may have been a mistake.  It could just be the recipe I picked but I found the dough incredibly hard to work with.  It was made with almonds, sugar, butter, and flour.  The thing this most reminded me of was crumble mix and my dough was certainly crumbly.  So crumbly that the stupid thing wouldn’t roll out without falling apart.

The biscuits also involved two layers of stars that needed sealed with a filling.  Seriously, after all the messing about with them my back aches from  leaning over the table.  Now that they are out of the oven and have cooled down I know that they taste great, but I’m not sure having 14 biscuits was worth all that effort.

Festive Almond Cookies

This weekend I made a Double Orange Cake. It was the first time I made this cake and it turned out really well. It was very light and not overly sweet.  It wasn’t overly hard to make but I did run into problems with the orange.  The recipe called for “the juice of one large orange”.  I didn’t use the whole orange as I thought that it would make the cake too moist.  I much prefer recipes that tell me exactly how much orange juice to use as I have no idea how large a large orange is.

Double Orange Cake

I like to make cakes.  I find it fascinating how they change in the oven.  Today I made two cakes before lunch.  I don’t normally do that but I had plans to take them to my friend’s house.  It turned out that I wasn’t able to go but Marty took most of the two cakes with him.  I just have to resist the pieces that he left behind.

Chocolate Chip and Almond Cake