Sooo... Japan!

So Favorite and I have been back from Japan for a while so I figured it was probably about time I posted pictures. This is going to be a long post so sit back and relax.

I met Favorite in San Francisco the night before our flight to Japan. The day of we got to the airport very early (there was no one at the international flights desk yet) and so we spend a huge amount of time waiting around. Then of course we spent another 12 hours on the flight. By the time we arrived in the Narita airport we had been awake about 18 hours ( we refused to sleep on the plane because we wanted to be able to sleep that night). We then spent another hour or so figuring out what train would take us toward our hotel and then another two hours on that train. When we finally stepped foot onto the streets of the Shinjuku area of Tokyo we were completely spent. AND we had no idea how to get to our hotel. After some wandering around Favorite saved us by combining some sweet map skills with some sweet police-officer-asking-skills to get us to the hotel. Dragging a huge suitcase around streets mobbed with people when you don't know where you are going is not the most fun thing when you've been up for almost 24 hours.

That night we went out and wandered into a nearby restaurant to eat. I tried my best to use our Japanese phrase book to get us some food and tea, but just to confound things more, we had happened into a Chinese food restaurant and I don't think anyone there understood Japanese either. After some pointing and awkward laughing and apologies Favorite and I ended up with some hot oolong tea, some fried noodle dish, and a plate of General Tso's chicken...

Okay, so obviously I could talk for hours telling in great detail the entire story of our trip, but I think I will save some of my words and let some pictures talk a bit.

Left: Shinjuku at night.













Right: Saw sculpture outside convention center.












Left: Giant cuckoo clock.












Right: Crowds in Harajuku on Sunday.










Left: Entrance to Meiji Shrine.











Right: Wedding at Shrine.










Below Left and Right: All dressed up in Harajuku


























Left: Mt Fuji.








Right: Imperial Gardens.













Left: HUGE Tree.












Right: Picnicking at the park







Left: Indoor bento picnic.













Right: Cherry Blossoms














Left: Assorted desserts with green tea.












Right: Outdoor bento picnic







Left: Big Green Dusty Guys.













Right: Assorted mochi.



So we had a great time. We caught the cherry blossom season perfectly, had a ton of delicious foods, and saw all kinds of crazy Japanese things. This post seems so lame to describe the trip. I took 549 pictures and just about all of them are of something different.

More Steamed Bean Paste Buns

Ok, so I am repeating myself a bit, but even though I've spoken about making bean paste buns before I don't think I've ever posted pictures.

I decided to make bean buns because I had a lot of bean paste left over from making the ichigo daifuku and I wanted to use some more of it before I put it in the freezer for next time.

Here they are! Oh the excitement.

Some things are much more difficult than others to get pictures of. Especially when you try to do it right out of the steamer while they are still getting your lens all fogged up.

Ichigo Daifuku (kind of)

So unbeknownst to my readership I have been experimenting behind closed doors. Not so long ago I was introduced to mochi. Actually the first type of mochi I tried was an ice cream daifuku, a little ball of ice cream covered in a skin of mochi. Mochi, in case you are unfamiliar, is glutinous rice cake made (traditionally) by pounding glutinous rice into a thick sticky dough. It can be flavored with all sorts of things, it can be baked, it can be filled. It is simply lovely. Well, it turns out one can make mochi at home easily enough by substituting the pounded glutinous rice with cooked, reconstituted glutinous rice flour. It may not have the same glorious light yet chewy and smooth texture of traditionally made mochi, but it also it tremendously less labor intesive. When I have a trio of strong men to pound my rice for me perhaps I shall try it that way.

Anyhow! I have been experimenting with making different mochi treats. I say "kind of" in the post title because I am actually cheating. I could not find glutinous rice flour so for the time being, until I can get to the closest Asian market, I am stuck with plain regular rice flour. No, it doesn't have the same texture, no it does not make treats quite as wonderful, but it seems to handle relatively the same, and if you do it right they still come out quite enjoyable.

So long story short I tried out making some ichigo daifuku which are mochi skins filled with whole fresh strawberries which have been surrounded in adzuki bean paste. I made some fresh bean paste just for the occasion and they came out pretty darn tasty. Wrapping the starberries in the bean paste and then covering them proved a bit tricky though, even with cold beans, so I also tried a couple with the strawberries hollowed out and the bean paste hidden inside.

As a side note, I have complained before about making bean paste and about how long it takes to cook the beans, well, this time I soaked them overnight and it cut my cooking time by what seemed like 90%! Splendid. Now the only time consuming, laborious part is straining out the skins :-P

<---Here is another picture of when I got tired of dealing with strawberries and made one just filled with bean paste. My skins are probably too fat, but for the time being I will blame it on not having the right ingredients.

Green Tea Cake with Adzuki Cream

The cake has been assembled! I finished making my matcha and red bean cake.

The cake part of this cake is a matcha sponge cake that I cooked in a jellyroll pan and then sliced into quarters. The filling is a sweetened whip cream with red bean paste. For those of you unfamiliar with red bean paste, or adzuki paste, it is made with cooked red beans, sugar, a pinch of salt, and a small amount of shortening for texture purposes. The beans are mashed and strained to remove hard bits and pieces of skin, and then it is all mixed together and simmered until thick. It is little labor intensive to make, but if you can't find it at your local store it's better to make it yourself I think than trying to buy it online. Plus then you have the added comfort of knowing the proportions of ingredients in your bean paste and having it be fresh and delicious and not taste like can!

So I made the bean paste early in the day because it takes HOURS to cook the beans. I then made the sponge cake and allowed it to cool. I whipped up the cream, added some sugar (not too much because the bean paste is sweet too) and then mixed in some bean paste until I liked the color. The recipe said 4 tbsp, but I might have put in up to twice that. Just taste it and stop adding when you like the flavor. I slathered the whipped cream mixture between the layers, stacked them up and then coated the whole thing. I put it in the fridge then to allow it all to set up a little. After dinner I made some gunpowder green tea and cut up the cake. I recommend using a bread knife and being delicate about cutting because if you're not you will squish out a lot of the filling and it just won't look very nice. Favorite had been questioning my judgement of mixing red bean paste with the green tea cake, but one bite changed that: "This is insanely delicious!!" So, we drank a whole pot of tea and ate more than half the cake in about 10 minutes.

I had seen this cake before and searched high and low on the internet for a recipe (had I known the filling was just whipped cream and bean paste I could have winged it, but I didn't). A lot of what I found was the green tea cake with chocolate. I didn't want to do that because it seemed to me the chocolate would overwhelm the delicate flavor of the matcha. The only version of this cake I could find was one for a jellyroll, but obviously the change in structure didn't hurt the tastiness of the cake. Here is the recipe for anyone else out there having a hard time locating one:

Matcha Cake with Adzuki Cream

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs, separated
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup water
• ½ tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp matcha powder
• ¾ cup flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• ¼ tsp salt
• powdered sugar
• 1 cup cream
• sugar to taste
• 4 tbsp red bean paste

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375
2. Grease parchment cut to fit jelly roll pan.
3. Beat egg yolks and ¾ cup of the sugar.
4. Add vanilla, water, and match powder at low speed.
5. In separate bowl beat egg whites with a pinch of salt.
6. Beat ¼ cup of sugar into egg whites until firm peaks form.
7. Mix flour, baking powder and salt in separate bowl.
8. Gradually add dry mix to yolk mixture.
9. Fold half of meringue into yolk mix until smooth.
10. Carefully fold in remaining meringue.
11. Pour batter into jelly roll pan and bake for 8-15 minutes.
12. Turn cake onto wax paper dusted with powdered sugar and peel off backing parchment.
13. Allow cake to cool.
14. Whip cream and add sugar to taste.
15. Add bean paste.
16. Spread whipped mixture onto cooled cake and cut and stack layers until desired size.
17. Serve immediately or refrigerate.

Squashed Buns!

So, before I expound on my latest foray into sweet creations I will give a quick update for those of you concerned with my transportation situation.

After much pain and agony I located a set of wheels for purchase in CALIFORNIA. As mentioned before it turns out that the new Honda Fit Sport wheels are such a hot commodity to steal that the wheels are back ordered everywhere. The Honda factory simply can't keep up with all the people trying to replace their swiped wheels. Anyhow, I got the wheels, had tires mounted and balanced and the whole shabang put back on my car. The guy from the dealership actually came to my house and put the wheels on right there and then took it back to the dealership to ensure there was nothing else wrong with it. Sounds great right? Well it was pretty good until he peeled out of the parking lot leaving a nice 6 foot strip of the rubber off my new tires. But he made it to the dealer and nothing else was wrong with the car, thank goodness. So I'm rolling again right? Wrong. I drove the car away from the dealer and my TPMS (tire pressure monitor sensor) light comes on. So back to the dealer I go and drop the car off again. So I went back again tonight to get the car. The guy tells me that the sensors weren't initialized correctly the first time, but they totally got it right this time. They even gave it a 15 minute test drive to make certain the light wouldn't come back on. Well it did. It came on 2 minutes from my house. So back I go tomorrow! So much for weekends!

Okay, enough of that. On to yummy stuff. So I've made red bean paste buns before. If you aren't familiar with these goodies they consist of a center of sweetened adzuki bean paste wrapped with a lightly sweetened dough and steamed until the dough is cooked through. The dough comes out soft and delightful and the bean paste is warm and sweet and satisfying. Well I was struck with a bit of inspiration when I had some left over veggies from doing some fondue tempura and I thought, mmmmm... SQUASH BUNS!

So I first made the squash paste. Of course I've never made "squash paste" so I had to kind of wing it. I microwaved the squash, butternut, by the way, until it was just soft enough to mash up. Once I had it mostly mashed I put it in a pot on the stove. I mixed in a good amount of brown sugar to taste and a pinch of salt and cooked it and cooked it (stirring very frequently) so as to remove as much of the moisture as possible. Once it had come to a good thick consistency I stuck it in my mini food processor and whizzed it up. I then pushed it through a seive to remove any extra fibrous bits that were left and, while the mixture was still warm, threw in some vegetable shortening for mouth feel and taste staying power. All in all the procedure to make the squash paste was very similar to making the bean paste except that it took infinitely less time. When making the bean paste the beans cook forever and the skins make sieving the whole mixture extremely time consuming.

So once the paste was made all that was left was to wrap them in dough and pop them in the steamer. There are plenty of recipes on the internet for the sweet bun dough, I recommend you try a few to find one you like a they can be pretty different in texture. Getting the paste in the dough can be a little tricky. You make a little pinch-pot cup out of the dough (remember from first grade?) and then bloop some of the paste in and try your darnedest to get it closed without squishing all the filling out in the process. I didn't take any pics of them pre-steam (I'm still trying to get a hang of this chronicling process) but here they are coming out of their happy little sauna.
I'm not going to lie, those are definitely my squashy fingerprints on the outside of the dough. You can also see that I cooked the buns on little cupcake papers. Recipes will usually tell you to cut out parchment to put them on. It might be easier to get the parchment off the bottom of the buns, but the pre-made cupcake papers are perfectly sized with no waste from unused cut paper.

And here is a good detail shot of the hot , gooey, squashy insides:

A little TOO detailed perhaps. I know I can see some kitty hairs in there. Feel free to leave those out when you make these at your house. So Favorite and I sat down to a couple of squash buns and some hot delicious green tea. It made for quite a lovely little late night snack.

Dim Sum Dessert

I love coconut and I also love the chewy wonderful texture of sushi rice, so when I bought a new recipe book on dim sum and found a recipe for Sweet Coconut Rice Bars I couldn't wait to make them.

Sweet Coconut Rice Bars

Bar:

• 2.5 c. uncooked glutinous rice
• 2.25 c. thick coconut milk
• .5 c. superfine sugar

Topping:

• 1.25 c. unsweetened dried shredded coconut
• .25 c. thick coconut milk
• .5 c. shaved palm sugar or dark brown sugar
• 3 tbsp. water

Recipe:

1. cook glutinous rice
2. heat rice, coconut milk, and sugar in medium heavy bottom saucepan until liquid is absorbed
3. spread rice in parchment lined baking pan
4. refrigerate until firm
5. combine shredded coconut and coconut milk in bowl
6. heat sugar and water in saucepan until slightly thickened
7. stir shredded coconut mix and sugar syrup until well combined
8. spread topping over rice and chill for another hour

Although these bars came out rather tasty and addictive, there are some thing I would do differently next time. The recipe calls for thick coconut milk but all I could find was cream of coconut. The recipe states that you can dilute coconut cream into thick coconut milk by adding water. I mistakenly confused coconut cream with cream of coconut and the result was less coconutty than I would have liked. Next time I will simply mix up the coconut cream and use it straight. I would also cut this recipe in half as it makes more than 2 people can eat in a weeks worth of desserts.