It’s the weekend of my cupcake party.  I’m scared.  I was insane to think that we could bake 100 cupcakes and decorate them all before 4pm on Sunday.  But, armed with an oven that can hold up to 12 cupcakes and a spreadsheet to manage the ingredients required to make 10 different flavours of cupcakes, I’m going to give it a go.

7pm:

The carrot cake cupcakes have failed.  I was using an American recipe and mistakenly used the wrong type of flour.  They taste like soda carrot cakes.  They are also a bit damp.  It could be that my cup of pineapple contained more liquid than was imagined in the recipe.  (I hate using cups as a measure.)

8pm:

Marty has arrived home from work and has declared that the carrot cake cupcakes make his top three list.  He doesn’t care that they taste like soda bread, he thinks that’s a bonus.  I’m still not going to use them for the party.  I’ll make another batch tomorrow using the correct flour.

9pm:

I’ve started to put together the dry ingredients needed for the chocolate chip cupcakes.  I must remember to label these as I plan to make cake mixes for more than one type of cupcake.

11pm:

The vanilla cupcakes have risen into little mountains.  They are supposed to be for fairy cakes, but Marty has declared them troll cakes.  Actually one looks awfully like that mashed potato sculpture from Close Encounters of a Third Kind.

1am:

I need to go to bed.  Marty is dyeing marzipan red to make apples to put on top of the toffee apple cupcakes.  The food colouring looks like blood and it’s dripping. I need to breathe deeply.

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.

There is no doubt that discussing the weather is an important part of Japanese culture.  Every summer conversation starts with, “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”.  Even email conversations start with the weather and then move on.

But it is incredibly hard to ignore.  I was born in Northern Ireland. I’m used to the weather being mildly annoying.  The sort of weather than means you don’t really want to plan a picnic in summer because it could be a bit damp or a bit cold.  But you make the plan anyway because, as my grandmother would say, a drop of rain won’t kill you.

Then we have Japan where weather is not mildly annoying, in say the way that an insect can be, but is much more like the giant stomping monsters that the Japanese love dearly.  My lunch plans today were cancelled because it might rain.  The airlines are also cancelling flights for the same reason but then this isn’t Northern Irish style rain.  This is due to the arrival of  Typhoon Ma-on which is expected to cause flooding and damage to areas of the city at some point today.  This is weather so powerfully destructive that it gets to have its own name.

And it’s not just the storms that kill.  So far this summer 26 people have died because of the heat and 54,000 people have been treated in hospital.  I no longer just glance out the window to see what the weather is doing.  Now I plan in advance.  I read the extreme high temperature forecast and the weather warnings and advisories.  Today I get to hope that the worst thing said about the weather is, “It’s wet today, isn’t it?”.

I saw a man walking a ferret today.  Marty tells me that this isn’t a strange thing, but it seemed strange to me.  Mind you I live in a country full of strange things.  I still have difficulty identifying everything I see in the grocery store.  There are whole aisles of food that I have no idea about and I don’t know if I’ll ever work out the difference between the 10 different types of fish flakes.

My local grocery store sometimes has stalls set up in the grocery packing area.  This week there has been a women selling green goo.  It can’t really be a green goo or slime, but I don’t want to get overly close to it.  I was terrified that she’d approach me and offer a free sample of the goo while I was packing my groceries.  I’m not really sure how to politely decline.  I know how to behave if I am given a sample.  I smile, say thanks, eat the goo, say something like “so delicious”, and then try to escape without buying any.  At least, that’s what everyone else was doing.  Sometimes it’s good to be a scary foreigner.

I saw a new item in the store today.  It took me a while to work out what it was but I can now buy probiotic straws. I think that I’ll continue to eat yoghurt to get friendly bacteria and avoid the straws.

I didn’t feel like going to the gym today.  It’s wet outside and going to the gym requires preparation I don’t need if I’m going to exercise by myself at home.  I thought I would try the new exercise DVD I bought, Banish Fat Boost Metabolism.  I’m writing this blog post because the only part of me that still seems to move is my fingers.  Going to the gym now feels like the easy option.

Marty and I finally got round to celebrating our 15th Wedding Anniversary.  We went to a beautiful Italian restaurant in the Tokyo Bay area. We decided on the 7 course menu as it gave us the option of trying lots of small dishes.  I particularly liked the “deep fried raviolo pasta stuffed with Tomino cheese, served with red onion jam” and the “Gragnano Paccheri pasta tossed with lobster ragout and cannellini beans”.

We had a great evening and after 15 years of marriage don’t get overly concerned if everything doesn’t go exactly to plan.  It wouldn’t be Marty if he didn’t do something crazy and end up getting a train in the wrong direction while I stand around waiting for him at the correct train station wondering if I’d messed up.  The fact that the restaurant was in a tower on the 47th floor overlooking Tokyo Bay unnerved me just a bit, but then both it and I survived the last earthquake.

I’m hoping for many more anniversary celebrations.

Sometimes I ask stupid questions.  I couldn’t find a dish cloth in the kitchen and I asked Marty if we had one.  He told me that he didn’t think so.  I thought about this and then I asked the stupid question.  “What did you use to clean the worktops while I was away?”.  I’ve been married for 15 years, you’d think I’d know not to ask questions like that.  I did discover the answer today after two hours of cleaning in the kitchen.   I can now see the worktops and it’s obvious that no-one has cleaned them in the past month.  I’ve even discovered the source of the nasty smell that’s been annoying me since I got back.

My kitchen isn’t big and I still haven’t finished cleaning.  Now that I’ve almost washed all the dishes I can see that the stove top is filthy and that the worktops, as well as being dirty, have been stained with tea rings.  I’m really hoping that baking soda will remove those or I’m going to be annoyed.  Actually, since I took a break to write this I’m probably already annoyed.  But I suppose there isn’t much point in that and I should go do some more cleaning.

I’m home again.  It’s going to take me the rest of this week to catch up with the electronic world.  It’s also going to take me a while to work out some sort of normal routine.  And the thought of sorting out three suitcases of laundry makes me want to crawl into bed with my Kindle for a week.  Being on holiday has made me lazy.

I love the part of the year when it’s obvious that Marty is older than me.

Birthday Cake

In December I ordered a new bikini for the holiday I’m going on tomorrow.  Unfortunately, because of the weather in Europe, the post has been delayed.  I wear an unusual size and wasn’t able to find anywhere in Tokyo to buy something.  I’m not really into beaches but I did spend some time on one during the summer of 2005.  Today I spent an hour or so hunting down the bikini I wore then.  It’s not very nice.  It’s a pale pink colour that doesn’t suit me but it’s better than no bikini.  It also isn’t a good fit, but with a bit of work I should be able to alter the strap.  I had also ordered a couple of new blouses to wear but they have also been delayed.

If I’m lucky when I get back from my holiday my new clothes and bikini will be waiting for me in one of the parcel boxes in the apartment.  But the way things are going I won’t be surprised if they arrive 5 minutes after I leave, need to be signed for, and are shipped back to Europe before I get home.

I’m also trying to find out what happened with some of the Christmas presents I sent.  I’m particularly annoyed at the box that has sat for 20 days with CityLink.  Instead of trying to deliver my parcel they have now decided to send it back to Amazon.  I’m going to try to be less grumpy, but I think I’ve been spoilt by the amazing postal service in Japan.