Surprises Are Nice

Sweet Potato Cake with Green Tea Buttercream

On the night before my birthday I went out for drinks with friends. On the day after my birthday I went on a super fun picnic at the beach. On my birthday proper, however, I stayed in and baked to my heart's content!

I'm not posting any recipes because I want to work on both of them, but here are a ton of pictures because I'm vain:

Layers

 Bake Hard,
Azara

Banana Peach Frozen Yogurt

This morning I had ice cream for breakfast. It was tangy, delicious, and I didn't feel like I was gonna die afterwards!

Check out this lovely crooked picture of my giant breakfast sundae!

Super easy with just three ingredients! You do need a food processor or high-speed blender in order to get a really creamy consistency.

1 frozen banana
1/2 a frozen peach
yogurt to taste (1/2 a cup or more)

Throw it all in a food processor and process until smooth and creamy, moving the fruit around if necessary to get an even texture.

Yum!

Bake Hard,
Azara

Chai Yogurt Gelatin

 First of all: Happy Birthday to meeeee!! I am 25 today, and am going to spend the entire day doing self-indulgent things like eating lots of noodles and working on my blog. Last night I celebrated with friends at a bar, tomorrow it'll be a picnic at the beach, but today... blogging and eating noodles and chocolate.

Now then! Yesterday I made chai gelatin and then mixed yogurt into half of it and layered the two gelatins for a pretty striped dessert.

I used empty Jello containers that I've been collecting for a while now. Not a huge Jello fan but worth it for the cups!


Recipe:
Chai Yogurt Gelatin (makes about 10-12 gelatin cups; easily halved)

3/4 cups cold water
6 packets gelatin
4 1/2 cups boiling water
5 chai teabags (or any other teabags you like)
sugar to taste (make sure it's good and sweet because when the gelatin is at refrigerator temperature it loses some of its sweetness)
A few tablespoons of whole yogurt


Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water and set aside to bloom. 

Gelatin bubble! Never seen it do that before...

Bring the 4.5 cups of water to a boil, add the teabags and remove from heat. Allow to steep for about five minutes or longer until the tea is quite strong.

Mix in the sugar. Divide gelatin mixture in half.

Measure out some yogurt and gradually add it to one half of the gelatin until a milky color is achieved.

Whisk the yogurt in until completely incorporated.





Assemble your cups or whatever mould you're going to use. If you plan on unmoulding the gelatin, lightly oil it for ease of removal.

Start collecting cups... they are awesome.

To layer: spoon chai gelatin into mould until a layer, whatever height you'd like, is achieved. Refrigerate for 15 minutes or longer until the layer solidifies. Gently spoon in a layer of yogurt gelatin. Repeat until the cups are full.
If you plan to unmould the gelatin, make sure the layers don't set to hard before adding the next as they will not bond. 15 minutes should be about right.

If done properly, the layers will be clean but will hold together when cut into.

 And here is the finished gelatin cup:

Yum!
Gel Hard,
Azara

Momo Daifuku

I made mochi!

Momo mochi, to be exact, momo being the Japanese word for peach. I came across some beauties at the farmer's market and I decided to use them in lieu of apricots, which make up the filling in the recipe I based my proportions on. Krystina Castella's recipe, in her book A World of Cake, has a few other differences, such as apricot nectar instead of coconut water and coconut nectar, and vanilla instead of lemon in the filling. I decided to wing it with what I had and it worked out nicely.

Here's what I did...

Recipe for Momo Mochi (makes 6 pieces):

*Note: This mochi must be eaten same-day as the rice-flour dough slowly melts away when it holds a liquidy fruit center. This won't happen if you fill it with bean paste, as one commonly finds mochi.

Filling:
1 ripe peach
1/4 cup sugar
squeeze of lemon

Mochi:
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cup coconut water
1 tablespoon coconut nectar
1 cup mochiko glutinous rice flour
potato starch


Dice the peach into small cubes, mix with the sugar and squeeze the lemon over it. Set aside.


For the mochi, put the sugar, water, coconut water and nectar into a pan and heat until the syrup is boiling.

Ingredients and delicious delicious coconut syrup.

Add in the mochiko flour and remove from heat. Mix until the lumps disappear, and let sit for five minutes.

Yummmm

In preparation for shaping the mochi, pour some potato starch onto a plate or into a bowl.

Dusting your fingers with starch, pinch off a sixth of the mochi dough and form it into a pancake about the size of your palm. Try not to make any spots too thin as the filling will seep out! Take a small spoonful of the peach, being careful to drain away any syrup back into the bowl, and place it in the middle of the pancake.



Pinch the edges up and form a mochi bundle, and then flatten the bundled part to make a smooth dumpling shape. Place the mochi seam-side down on a plate sprinkled with a little starch. Done!

The finished mochi!

Delicious, chewy, lovely!

Bake Hard!
Azara

Matcha (Powdered Green Tea) Gummies

I have been obsessed with gummies for as long as I can remember, which I believe is due to my dad's love of Haribo Happy Cola gummi coke bottles. These little gummies featured in my childhood as incentive to finish dinner, homework, a hike... you name it, Happy Cola was the light at the end of the tunnel.

They kind of look like rocks.

When I found out how gummies can be made from scratch several years ago in a magical Japanese book pictured below, I was beside myself. I'd heard of the fancy, expensive gummies of Japan and fantasized about traveling overseas to sample them, but the gummi book gave me something almost as good, namely the tools to make my own superfancy gummies at home! Yes.

This book is so beautiful. Seriously.

What my gummies could have looked like instead of rocks... if only I had a mould!

This is the recipe I used, with a couple deviations. I can read some of this!!! Hurraaaaay

So yeah, the book is almost entirely in Japanese, and guess who doesn't read Japanese. This guy. It took me some months of puzzling things through but I used pictures, word repetition, a basic knowledge of how gummies work plus a couple other dorky techniques to decipher most of the key words in the book. I also learned the katakana alphabet, invaluable for being able to read the numerous loan words from English. Soooo rewarding to have my first recipe attempt come out so well, especially since I didn't have corn syrup or glucose on hand!

Mmmm so gummi!

Trying my first recipe from the book was the first thing I did once I had this house in Santa Monica to myself. That's right, I am housesitting in Santa Monica in an amazing two-story apartment with the most gorgeous bamboo floor in the universe! I'll be here for a month doing some research, reading on the beach and playing around with gummies. Ahhh summer... So good.

The above picture is of some gummies after I wet them; I wanted to see if washing some of the starch off would give them a more gummi-like appearance, but they look even more like river rocks than before, this time the slimy kind. How do you get gummies unsticky without destroying the glossy gummi finish? I don't know that it's possible... I'll have to play around with drying them out, or applying a very thin layer of starch with a paintbrush.

You can see a thin white shell on the top of the gummi up there. It was created in the starch-moulding process I used to make the pebble shape my gummies have. Because I didn't have a mould on hand, I made depressions in potato starch with a small spoon and filled the recesses with the warm molten gummi. It worked alright, but I would love to be able to see that rich color on the surface of the candy.


Recipe:
Matcha Gummies (adapted from Gummy Book pictured above)

Either gummi moulds or a bunch of starch (it can be reused after moulding)
1 1/2 tsp matcha powder
10 tsp + 1/2 cup hot water (just heat a bunch of water and measure from that)
5 tsp raw sugar (refined is fine)
4 tsp raw brown sugar
2 packets powdered gelatin (1/4 oz, 7g)

Spread starch out on a flat surface. Create imprints with a spoon or any other object of choice.
Place matcha powder in a small bowl or cup and add two teaspoons of hot water. Stir until a thick paste forms. Add the remaining 8 teaspoons of water one at a time, being sure to eliminate any lumps by pressing them against the side of the cup with the back of a spoon. You can also use a small whisk as the mixture gets looser, or, best case scenario, use a matcha whisk!
Add the matcha mixture to the 1/2 hot water and put over medium heat. Add the sugars and stir until melted completely.
Sprinkle both packets of gelatin over the top of the liquid, and mix until all lumps disappear. This will take a while! Turn the heat to low if it starts to boil.
Once the mixture is completely homogenous, making sure the heat is very low, take a spoonful and pour it into a little cup, swirling to coat the bottom. Stick it in the freezer for a minute or so and test for gumminess. If it isn't gummi enough, turn the heat up a bit and cook for a few minutes more. Test like this until amount of gumminess desired is achieved.
Spoon the molten gummi into the moulds or starch recesses and let set for several hours.

Soon I will try this recipe again, maybe with corn syrup, definitely paying closer attention to timing on the final steps of the recipe.

The matcha powder I used. $6!!

Finally, I will leave you with a delicious picture of the green tea mini KitKat bar my cousin Alec's girlfriend Christine gave to me after a day of sushi-fueled dress and makeup shopping. So good.
Mostly only available in Japan, along with a myriad of other specialty flavors, like all these (scroll down to 'standard finger bars')!

Bake Hard,
Azara

Buttermilk Cobbler with a Variety of Fresh Cali Fruits

This is a cobbler made by myself and my cousin/best friend Jennifer for a 4th of July barbecue. Because we are greedy, we put in probably twice as much fruit as was called for in the recipe. And then decided we needed to compensate by doubling the biscuit recipe and giving the cobbler a bottom crust as well. It was like cobbler pie... amazing!

Probably a tad more than we needed for the barbecue, but who can complain about cobbler for breakfast?

Buttermilk Cobbler with Mixed Fruit (adapted from this Food Network recipe)

Preheat the oven to 425°. Butter a baking dish, the largest you have if you want to make the volume in the recipe that follows. It can easily be halved or otherwise adjusted at will.

For the fruit*:
1 small container raspberries
1 small container strawberries
2 superripe peaches
2 ripe mangoes
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon flour (optional; helps the pieces of fruit maintain some integrity, but we skipped it)
*note: the amount and kind of fruit that can be included in this recipe is very flexible; if it looks like there isn't enough in the pan, just sprinkle some more on top! Next time I would add blueberries too... but we'd eaten them all by the time we put the cobbler together =(

For the cobbler:
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
6 tablespoons brown sugar
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 1/3 cups buttermilk
2 tablespoons brown sugar, for topping
Whipped cream as needed

Dice all fruit to desired size. It doesn't really matter how you do it, so it's really about your preference.
Sprinkle the sugar and flour, if using, over the fruit and mix well with your hands to avoid mushing things around. Set aside.
Combine dry ingredients for cobbler in a bowl. Work the butter into the dry ingredients with your fingers if you're cool or with a pastry cutter if you don't like getting your fingers dirty (wack!). Continue to work the butter in until the texture becomes that of coarse crumbs. Add the buttermilk in and stir to form a dough. Divide in half.
Spread half of the cobbler dough into a thin layer on the bottom of the pan. Spread the fruit out over the dough, and then use a spoon to scoop evenly-spaced dollops of the remaining cobbler dough across the top. Sprinkle the 2 tablespoons of brown sugar over the cobbler blobs. Put the cobbler into the oven until the dough on top is golden-brown, about 20-25 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream.


We didn't add any cinnamon or vanilla to the fruit because we wanted the natural flavors of the fruits themselves to be front and center, but if desired, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 2 of vanilla can be added to the fruit before the sugar and flour.

Bottom crust... yesss.

Bake Hard,
Azara

Strawberry Shortcake à la TJ's

POW! Jenny's Shortcake

Tonight my cousin/best friend Jennifer and I made strawberry shortcake with Trader Joe's strawberries, cream and shortcakes. Everything was ready to go so they were simple to throw together and soooo good!

POW II! Azara's Shortcake

The process:

 

Bake Hard!!

Azara