Pudding baked on 06/03/08

I just found this photo, but I'm not 100% sure what it is. My guess is bread pudding, but not sure.
I can almost smell the spice just looking at this photo :) mmmm, yummy!

Allergy free cake

As I mentioned a few times, I would prefer giving my daughter non-wheat products, and on that day, I made an allergy free cake! My daughter is allergic to eggs, dairy products and soy (which is a bit upsetting as we've got lots of soy products in Japan), and this cake doesn't have any of them! Most supermarkets nowadays have a section where there are allergy free products on the shelf. On the back of "white self-raising flour", there are some recipes using this special flour. The recipe for this cake is one of them. My daughter loves this cake, and so do we! I thought it was clever to use a ripe banana instead of using an egg. The banana has a similar texture to eggs.

I'm not sure if I can write the recipe for the cake because it's not mine. I don't follow the recipe exactly though. I use less oil for instant. When I recreat the recipe, I will write it.

Zenzai （ぜんざい）

I cooked black beans the other day, and I thought the taste was very similar to red kidney beans. (I'm not sure if everybody agrees with me though.) So, I decided to have them as hot Zenzai adding glutinous rice flour dumplings.

In Japan, azuki beans are used for Zenzai while red kidney beans are commonly used in Okinawa. Okinawan zenzai is topped with crushed ice, and if it's without ice and served hot, we simply call it "hot zenzai."

Chinbin (Okinawan-style crepe)

We have some kinds of crepes in Okinawa, but today I'm going to write about a sweet crepe called Chinbin. It is very simple, but really tasty. I have never made it from scratch and always use this packet mix. There are only simple ingredients in the mix: wheat flour, Glutinous riceflour, baking powder, brown sugar and salt. I just add water to the mix, and then fry it as you would any other crepe mix.

Our crepe has a distinctive brown sugar flavour and tastes really nice. We commonly use brown sugar which is much more nutritious than refined white sugar. (we grow sugarcane, and brown sugar is one of the popular souvenirs from Okinawa.)

When I make Chinbin from scratch, I will write a recipe for it, so you can try :-)

Ohagi (Rice Ball covered in Sweet Azuki )

I cooked rice too soft this morning, and I thought of using it to make rice cakes. For sweet rice cakes, we normally use Mochi Gome - Sweet Rice instead of using normal Japanese rice.

I made Koshian (mashed sweet azuki beans) using tinned azuki which I bought from Sainsbury's and mashed up the rice. I formed the rice into balls in my hands and put sweet azuki around the balls.

It turned out to be okay for the first try - but not amazingly tasty. It was spontaneous, so maybe next time, I will get the right recipe.

Kasutera/Castella

We have different kinds of cakes in Japan. Most of them are french-style, I think. Of course, we have our own sweets and cakes, but the western-style cakes are popular as well. One of my favourites is kasutera, a sponge cake which is a specialty of Nagasaki. Apparently, it was originally from Spain and brought to Japan in the 16th century.

A couple of years ago, I was dying to eat this sponge cake, so made my own. It turned out to be really easy to make, actually. When I was in Okinawa, I had never baked cakes. I didn't grow up using the oven to start with and always thought that baking was pain in the neck. When I cook, I don't normally measure the ingredients. It works that way in cooking, but not in baking. You have to be accurate how much flour to use and so on. Otherwise, it will be spoiled.

When I baked kasutera for the first time, I was amazed how easy it was and how good it was. It was a real kasutera! I had never thought I could make my own kasutera in my life.

Baking is still not my expertise, but there are a few things I can bake.I will write the recipe for kasutera soon.

*The shape of kasutera is normally rectangle, but mine is rounded as I didn't have the right baking tin... Sorry about the bad photo. It's a bit blurred.