trying out season's favorites

Saturday, July 17

For these past several weeks, I have been busy trying not to miss fruits in season; strawberry, raspberry, peach... and today, it was apricot that I had. To tell you the truth, I don't particularly fancy apricots among out of all kinds of fruits... I like them fresh, but as fresh apricots would be in store for just a week or so and tend to be very expensive in Tokyo, I have had limited experience with them.
And there was a post about apricot coffee cake and its recipe in Clotilde's blog a few days ago, and the cake in the picture looked scrumptious. Now that apricots are in store, and that I have found an interesting recipe using them, it must be about time - to eat apricots!

Plump apricots neatly piled up in a small corner of the shelf were so appealing that I had a compulsion to grab them all, but those bright yellowish orange jewels were in fact pretty much as expensive as those in Tokyo (too bad). I just got a small bagfull of them for the cake.



Since I don't have a large (or small, in fact) round cake pan at hand, I just used small cupcake cups and make mini-cakes. As the batter seemed to be very simple in the recipe, I decided to add some little extras; first, I thought of almond meal, but figured that I didn't have almonds at home except for a small amount of slivered ones. This wouldn't make too much of almond flavor, I thought, and then decided to add crystallized ginger bits in the batter, while slivered almonds would top the cake along with apricot wedges.



The cakes turned out pretty good - slightly tangy and pleasantly sweet ripe, juicy apricots made an attractive contrast with somehow cookie-y cake, and the spicy ginger gave them unique and delicious snap, both in flavor and texture. I wish I had put more apricots on top, though - I thought too much of them might make mess when baked - it would have been even more fruity.

***

In the afternoon we went to beach. I have never been a beach-bum, ever, and I would rather even avoid staying for too long there. But recently I have been stuck in the house and spending too much time sitting in front of the computer because of work, I thought it would make a nice little change... and just watching waves and surfers, and lying down and read, it certainly did make a nice change.