The first time I tried to make Zen Can Cook's green tea crepe cake, I got the crepe version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This time I decided to follow the recipe exactly instead of using a different pastry cream recipe. It also reminded me why I didn't use Zen's recipe last time: there's six egg yolks in it. I will be eating a bunch of egg white omeletes this week.
The pastry cream needs to be firm and solid enough to hold up the stack of crepes. Zen's recipe has both egg yolks and cornstarch for thickening so it's got the consistency of very solid jam. I stacked up all of the crepes that made it (twenty), and the tower didn't even lean.
Twenty crepes is too many for this cake. It was too tall to eat easily and we ended up splitting the slices into the top and bottom half.
The pastry cream has a lovely orange flavor but I didn't think it went that well with the crepes. The green tea turned the crepes green but I couldn't taste it at all. The texture was nice so the next time I make these crepes, I'll probably double or triple the amount of matcha powder in the batter. Zen also has a version that is chocolate crepes with the same orange pastry cream. I think that this combination makes more sense than green tea with orange.
This cake would work nicely as a single serving, personal dessert. I may try making half sized crepes for small cakes instead of one large one.
Showing posts with label Japanese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japanese. Show all posts
Monday, April 22, 2013
Thursday, November 08, 2012
Potluck Experiments: 抹茶マーブルシフォン (Matcha Marbled Chiffon Cake)
As part of my post-hurricane potluck baking experiments, I decided that I wanted to try baking a nice cake made with green tea. I had bought some good quality matcha (a type of Japanese green tea) powder from Amazon and so far I'd only made desserts using green tea cream. Why not bake a nice cake with matcha instead?
American baked desserts are notably sweeter than baked desserts in Japan. I like the flavor of matcha in a dessert but it really does taste weird when the dessert is at American levels of sweetness. My parents have mentioned that one of the things they had a hard time adjusting to when we lived in Japan was that the cakes were not sweet in the way that they were expecting. I ended up with the opposite reaction: Japanese-style cakes that are made to American sweetness levels don't taste right.
All of the recipes I found that looked promising for matcha cakes were in Japanese. I couldn't find English translations (or I couldn't figure out the right phrases to google). Eventually I ended up using google translate and my horrible Japanese to translate several recipes that looked promising.
The Japanese was not the most difficult part of translating the recipes - the different measurement systems were. Most Americans don't know that we're the odd man out when it comes to cooking measurements, and it's not Imperial versus metric. Almost every other country (except Australia) uses weight or mass when measuring dry ingredients, but we use volume.
Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that. Liquid ingredients are generally measured by volume in most countries but with a different measuring system than in the US. Most dry or bulky ingredients are measured by weight or mass instead of volume.
The worst problem is converting from US to Imperial (UK) or vice versa, where we use the same words but mean different amounts. This is why we can have ounces of milk and ounces of butter in the US and mean two completely separate measurements. Fluid ounces are not the same thing as solid ounces. This is also why you can't buy a cookbook in England and use it back in the US. I've got a UK version of one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks and I ended up buying another US copy of it because it was easier than converting every single recipe.
There are different conversions for each ingredient. One cup of milk and one cup of flour do not have the same weight. If you do end up having to translate a recipe, make sure that you look up the conversions for each ingredient. Don't use the conversion for flour when you are calculating the amount of sugar!
If you scroll down this page to the baking conversions, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
American baked desserts are notably sweeter than baked desserts in Japan. I like the flavor of matcha in a dessert but it really does taste weird when the dessert is at American levels of sweetness. My parents have mentioned that one of the things they had a hard time adjusting to when we lived in Japan was that the cakes were not sweet in the way that they were expecting. I ended up with the opposite reaction: Japanese-style cakes that are made to American sweetness levels don't taste right.
All of the recipes I found that looked promising for matcha cakes were in Japanese. I couldn't find English translations (or I couldn't figure out the right phrases to google). Eventually I ended up using google translate and my horrible Japanese to translate several recipes that looked promising.
The Japanese was not the most difficult part of translating the recipes - the different measurement systems were. Most Americans don't know that we're the odd man out when it comes to cooking measurements, and it's not Imperial versus metric. Almost every other country (except Australia) uses weight or mass when measuring dry ingredients, but we use volume.
Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that. Liquid ingredients are generally measured by volume in most countries but with a different measuring system than in the US. Most dry or bulky ingredients are measured by weight or mass instead of volume.
The worst problem is converting from US to Imperial (UK) or vice versa, where we use the same words but mean different amounts. This is why we can have ounces of milk and ounces of butter in the US and mean two completely separate measurements. Fluid ounces are not the same thing as solid ounces. This is also why you can't buy a cookbook in England and use it back in the US. I've got a UK version of one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks and I ended up buying another US copy of it because it was easier than converting every single recipe.
There are different conversions for each ingredient. One cup of milk and one cup of flour do not have the same weight. If you do end up having to translate a recipe, make sure that you look up the conversions for each ingredient. Don't use the conversion for flour when you are calculating the amount of sugar!
If you scroll down this page to the baking conversions, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
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