it's about this time of the year again

... well I might have been a bit late again.



I have been lagging behind in blogging many recent developments, but here I'm making this a note to self; last week I got around to soaking dried fruits in liquors in preparation for making fruit cake for Christmas. Last year I didn't need to do this as I had some leftover mincemeat from the year before, but well, this year, I had nothing, so I made it from scratch.

That said, I decided not to make traditional mincemeat this year. Instead, I just soaked fruits directly in liquors, without adding sugar or fat, which is what I used to do before. This time I had semi-dried black figs, large white figs, prunes, mirabelles (a kind of plum), and pears, all of which are from France. I also had some sultana raisins and candied zest of bitter oranges from Spain, plus candied zest of lemon for which I don't know where it is from.

I chopped up everything (except raisins), threw them altogether into a large jar, and poured some French rum and brandy - from A. Legoll and Cognac Frapin, respectively. I seem to have soaked something like 2.5lb of dried fruits in total in 10-12 oz. of rum and 3 oz. of cognac. This should be a plenty for this year's cakes, and probably for the next year as well.

Now my jar of fruitcake fruits is sitting in the kitchen (not by the windows, though) and getting ready to be used in a month's time or so. Ideally, in order for my fruits cakes to fully develop their flavors, I would have liked to soak my fruits a few months before baking them into cakes and then let sit the cakes for another month or two before they're eaten, but I'll have to live with what I have to live with; I've only got a month for my fruits to get liquor-steeped and another month for the cakes to sit before Christmas this year. Not too bad, as long as I manage to bake cake in time, a month from now. Let's see how it goes...

preserves not for preservation

I love all sorts of fruits out there (okay, most of them), but I was never a big fan of them when cooked, especially jams. Other than marmalades, which are the only fruit conserve that I have constantly and positively liked, I would never really be tempted to grab one of those typically large jars of jam on the store shelves, let along making one myself.

Recently, I have been playing around cooking different kinds of fruits (such as roasting them and baking them into cakes) and actually enjoying them a lot. I now even think of making a jam - or something like it. I realize that making a jam is a good solution when you have a bunch of fresh fruits that are becoming overripe and you need to use them up quick. That said, I don't want to give my fruits an overdose of sugar, so my compromise is to make low-sugar or even sugar-free quick jams.

First thing that I made in this recent series of my jam making experiences was a spiced peach jam. I had one large yellow peach that was almost about to be spoiled, and I remembered this one recipe (in Japanese) for spiced peach jam that I had found a long time before.

With this recipe, you cook chunks of peach with a little honey and juice of lemon as well as spices (she uses vanilla, cinnamon, and cloves) only until the cooking juice is reduced and thick. It doesn't call for sugar or long cooking time, and you don't need to sterilze a storage jar, because the jam has to be consumed within a couple of days, anyways. So this is something you should make in a small portion and to enjoy the natural flavor and sweetness of a fruit, rather than for the purpose of preserving it.


For my jam, I spiced it up with a vanilla bean and cardamom pods. I think cardamom added a clean and refreshing feature to the ripe and sweet cooked peach.

As I was happy with my peach jam, I tried on other fruits at hand using the same method (cooking with honey and lemon juice, plus some extra flavors). I took a couple of ripe figs and paired them with rosemary.

The combination of fig and rosemary is something I am so addicted to these days, and it was great in a form of jam, too. It was delicious alone on toast, but I served it with some cheese..


I tried mascarpone and gorgonzola, both of which have been known to go well with figs (actually, figs have a high affinity to many kinds of cheese...). Although I love figs with mascarpone, here I think the blue cheese was a winner of the day; the concentrated sweetness of the fruits needed an equally powerful partner to go, perhaps.

I also tried a mango jam on another occasion, using lime and ginger and served on slices of good cheese croissant and cheddar. Here the saltiness of the cheeses provided a nice contrast to the sweetness of mango, making a nice, light snack.



It is only in the last couple of years or so that I have started looking on the bright side of jams (thanks to some good jams out there, such as ones by Christine Ferber and June Taylor), and being able to enjoy genuine goodness of fruits and/or unusual combinations of fruits with spices/herbs in them. The more new kinds I see, the more I am tempted to try... now, how I wish they are available in a smaller portion so that I can sample more kinds; after all, jams aren't something I would want to eat everyday, and if/when I get a regular-sized jar of jam, I'd find it a bit too much for me to finish all up. I wonder if I am the only one who's saying such a thing?

what berries?

No sooner than I mumbled that I wouldn't really be able to find blackberries in Tokyo the other day (because I would have liked to add some blackberries to the roasted fruit galette), my mom sent me a huge care package loaded with fresh summer fruits and vegetables, alongside a basket of what seemed like blackberries.

Or so we thought - they might well have been mulberries, though. They were really tart, so much so I ate only a few right out of the basket and turned the remaining majority to some desserts, including cobbler and mousse, but what I liked the best was a simple way of serving berries - with scones.

This was a great excuse for me to try the ginger scone recipe from Nancy Silverton's Pastries from the La Brea Bakery (Villard, 2000) for the second time; I had tried it once a couple of months back and was really happy with my scones that had turned pretty much as good as La Brea Bakery's.

The recipe does not use ground ginger but a bunch of crystallized ginger along with lemon zest, together which I think make really tangy and refreshing scones. This time, I used grated zest of a lime instead of lemon because I wanted to match the scones to the accompanying berries, which I combined with sugar and lime juice to make scone sauce.

The scones, served with clotted cream and the berries, were delish, and I thought it was a really nice change from an ordinary cream-tea staple of fruit scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam - I even thought that I'd like my scones better with fresh berries like these than with sugar-laden preserves.


I got this idea of serving blackberries with scones from my friend/fellow blogger Naoko, who said she'd tried the recipe from a recent issue of Good Food Magazine. The original recipe apparently didn't tell you to add lime juice to the berries, but I liked how the citrus added another dimension of tartness to the berries, although I couldn't really tell a taste of lime in the scones.

And the berries: they may not have been blackberries that I had wanted to have, but I sure did enjoy the fruits fresh from the backyard of my mom's, and appreciated her for the care she had sent to me.