Valentine’s Day is coming. Surely the sweet on the Day has to be Chocolate. According to me, if it is Chocolate sweet the flavour should be Raspberry.
So I made Japanese sweet iwith Chocolate and Raspberry flavour.
I have to remind you that this is not a normal Chocolate sweet. It is still a Japanese sweet ‘Wagashi’ with Chocolate flavour. So the ingredients of the outer part is mainly White Beans with Chocolate Powder.
Here’s the thing, I had some Purple Sweet Potato (Ube) and Soy Milk (made by me) at home. I wanted to use them and make something tasty for tea time. I started cooking Purple Sweet Potato into purée and then I came up with the image of soft purple cream oozing out of soft sponge when you put a fork into it … That was the moment I decided to make a ‘Purple Magic Cake with Soy Milk’.
You might be wondering ‘What is a Magic Cake?’ OK, I explain. A Magic Cake is a custardy moist spongy cake made with whipped Egg and quite large quantities of liquid. When you bake it comes out in three layers with a very light spongy top layer, soft and moist middle layer and creamy custardy base layer.
I have put a recipe of a type of Magic Cake almost a year ago on this Blog. That was ‘Sake Soufflé Quiche with Figs & Pine Nuts’ which I received the Second Award in the Sake Cooking Competition with that recipe last year.
My experiment went on ….
Have you heard about ‘Sho Chiku Bai‘? You might think “Yes, it’s a ‘Sake’, isn’t it?“. That is correct, but there is an origin that the company named their sake with that name. ‘Sho-Chiku-Bai‘ means ‘Pine Tree – Bamboo – Plum Blossom’ in Japanese in this order. They are the three objects Japanese think very auspicious so that we use an image of these three a lot for happy occasion such as a wedding and during New Year period.
I wanted to make some kind of sweet based on ‘Sho-Chiku-Bai’ and came up to this idea.
It is made of a type of Japanese Sweet called ‘Nerikiri‘ and not marzipan which you might think it looks like.
The main ingredients are Beans, Sugar and Rice Flour. It is very simple but through a lot of complicated process.
Happy New Year to you all again! Hope you had great Christmas and New Year’s Day. The first sweet I would like to introduce you in 2017 is this sweet called ‘Hanabira Mochi‘.
‘Hanabira‘ means flower petal in Japanese so I shall call this sweet Petal Mochi.
It is a sweet we traditionaly have only during New Year period. It started in the palace to celebrate a New Year by eating two layers of white and red mochi with some other food. Until the Meiji period the custom spread out to people in the country and the food got simplified onto some similar type of sweet that I made here.
Brand New Year has arrived! During 2016 I experienced many new things and thank you all the people who visited my Blog. I wish you all a very Happy New Year! 🙂
This year we are having very mild winter in England. We hardly need to heat rooms during daytime and wear gloves outside. So it is very unlikely that we are going to have a White Christmas. Although it is not cold, in my mind “Winter = Snow” so another sweet I made in the Winter theme was this one.
It is made of ‘Mochi‘ Rice Cake type of sweet.
I wandered into a little wonderland called ‘the Gingerbread City’.
It was a miniature town made of many Gingerbread Houses by different designers and architects.
They were constructed with all sorts of sweets and candies.
What kind of traditional Food do you have during the Christmas season? In England people have Roast Turkey with Gravy for their meal and then Mince Pie or Christmas Pudding for dessert or Tea.
I wanted to make some Japanese Sweet with a Christmas theme so after thinking for a few days decided to make this fusion sweet.
It might look like just a normal Christmas Pudding which is a wheat cake with lots of dried fruits and steamed in a quite big bowl. My version is much much smaller, just about 5cm in diameter. It is actually a very traditional Japanese sweet ‘Nerikiri‘ that is made from sweet Bean paste, rice flour and sugar. The white part is also made from sweet White Bean Paste and not icing sugar.
How time flies! I feel like it was just a month ago that I mentioned Sakura Junction had a successful stall in the Christmas Market in 2015. Now it is the time again that we are going to have a stall for introducing our sweets to public.
The 🎄Christmas Market🎄 is actually TOMORROW!!
These are some of the range that I am going to take for the market.
On top of the various Japanese sweets we are going to serve ‘Chicken Kara-age (Japanese Fried Chiken)’ this year.
There are Sushi and some other food as well. You can have nice Japanese lunch or Tea with my sweet there.
The venue is in North London. If you live near by or even from different part of London please pop in to see me. I have been working very hard to prepare for this occasion so will be very happy if you come to say ‘Hi’ in person💓
The Market is open only for 4 hours! So don’t miss it! See you there.
Sakura Junction 