Finally made a trip to the newly opened Japanese supplies baking store in Hong Kong! This is the official website of the store. http://www.tomizawa.co.jp/
Got my hands on all the stuff that I have been wanting to get but have not because I didn’t know where to get them before. Stuff like gelatin sheets, kinako (soy bean powder) and even 和三盆 sugar! My absolute favourite sugar/candy that I never fail to buy when I am in Japan. I shall dedicate another post to it. This is about my first attempt at baking a chiffon cake. With my son. He is almost two years old now and has experience in bread making in school, so I figured we can have a mother-and-son baking day once a week from now on.
That’s right. It’s a chiffon cake (not!). It didn’t rise as much as it should and it was neither light nor airy like chiffon. Numerous steps have gone wrong along the way.
1) 60ml of water and 60ml of oil seem to result in a way too watery batter, so I had to try and remedy it with more flour.
2) The egg yolks had some egg white in it and the egg whites have a little egg yolk in it. Apparently, in cake making, one has to be really anal about this separation of yolks and whites if you want your cake to rise properly.
3) Because of No.2 above, the egg whites wouldn’t transform into stiff white peaks despite beating them for a long time. I gave up and folded it into the batter anyway.
The resulting cake, though not “chiffon-y”, was not bad tasting. The balance of sweetness and the nutty aroma of the soybean was well balanced. It was a little on the dense side, but sufficiently moist. The red bean cream, made from mashing red beans and mixing it with whipped cream, complemented the cake quite well, giving it additional richness and a creamy feel.