three months old

I kept one small loaf of fruit cake that I made in the past December for last Christmas. About two weeks old on Christmas day, the cake had quite a smack of alcohol; so I decided to keep one to "mature" more. Now it's been three months since the day I made it - and actually a year and a half since I prepared the liquor-soaked fruits -, and the cake has definitely developed its taste; it has gotten a lot mellower with a more refined tone of liquor I think.

Having eaten the last slice of the last loaf, I contemplate making a new jar of fruit-cake fruits in the liquor for Christmas this year - or maybe even next year, might as well.

meant to be for Easter

I messed up from the beginning. Well this is marmalade bread and butter pudding that I made on this past Easter Sunday, using yuzu marmalade and candied peel of natsu-mikan, or so-called Japanese summer orange, both of which my mom had made. It was delicious.

So what was wrong with it all?

Like I have said, I messed up from the beginning when I forgot that I had been going to make Hot Cross Buns, or sweet rolls traditionally and specifically served in the morning of Good Friday. When I realized it in the Thursday evening, I was exhausted from work and didn't have ingredients at hand. I had already run out of time, but I decided to make some anyways even if I wouldn't make it in time.

So I did try and make Hot Cross Buns dough in the following evening of Friday, casually hoping that I would at least be able to have a bite on "Friday" on a timezone of somewhere in the world, say, Hawaii, which is 19 hours behind that of Japan.

The plan didn't quite work. Not only did I fail to make it in time, but I actually never had Hot Cross Buns out of the oven - at least in the way they are supposed to be; the dough didn't rise in the first place, and it never did. Period. I don't know exactly what went wrong - maybe it was too cold in the kitchen, maybe I left the yeast to get formy a bit too long, or whatever. I felt too daunted to chuck the whole thing, but I was also too bummed to bring myself to carry through and make the fiasco look like Hot Cross Buns, so I shaped the dough into rolls and baked them, but skipped the cross part on the top.

The bread had barely risen when they were out of the oven, but managed to taste okay. As they were baking, I fished around to find a way to eat the buns in a more enjoyable way, and settled on the idea of using them in bread pudding; that way, stone-hard bread might be a little more palatable, I hoped. As I happened to use a Delia Smith recipe for Hot Cross Buns and failed, I decided to have Delia make up for the failure and gave a try to her recipe of bread pudding (no, it wasn't really like that, I know, it wasn't her fault that it failed, me, loser).


That's how the bread and butter pudding came out - it was, I repeat, delicious, hot out of the oven and served with a dollop of mascarpone cheese. In fact, it would have tasted even better if it hadn't been for the miserable failure of my bread-making attempt.

Now I have to wait another year to give it another try to make Hot Cross Buns.

not for hunting

This has got nothing to do with Easter except that it is egg-shaped, which I think is a rason good enough for inclusion in a vaguely Easter-related post here. Named goma-tamago, or literary "black sesame egg", it is a light cake filled with sweet black sesame & bean curd and sweet, soft black sesame paste in the middle, and coated with white chocolate.


They are sold as a Tokyo souvenir and I wanted to try one of these when I saw them at a store, and I recently got a chance; I had to buy something from Tokyo for someone, so I bought two boxes - one for them, one for us.


I had been expecting something like moist cake bearing soft and runny sesame paste inside, but what came out was a rather dry cake filled with thick sesame paste, coated with a super skinny layer of white chocolate. I wouldn't say it was all that disappointing, but just wasn't what I had thought it would be like.

It made me long for another sweet using black sesame, called goma-suri dango, a bite-size really soft mochi (rice cake) filled with super soft black sesame paste, manufactured and sold in Tohoku area (north of Japan). Hopefully I can get some and blog about them soon...


This isn't for hunting either

"bunnies" wish you

a Happy Easter!