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Strawberry shortcake was introduced to Japan in the Taisho era, but nobody knows who exactly introduced it. It may have been Kadokura Kuniteru (the guy who started a big bakery called Colombin) adapting a French cake to Japan, or Fujiya (another bakery that is still mighty popular today) borrowing the strawberry shortcake eaten in the US. At some point (Fujiya claims they did it), the biscuits in an American shortcake were switched for genoise or sponge cake, supposedly because Japanese people liked soft desserts better. At the time, Japan was extremely interested in the west, and western cake carried a certain image of glamour and luxury, but they had too few refrigerators and too much war until 1955, when it really took off.
Strawberry shortcake is everywhere in Japan. Pretty much every cafe and bakery will sell you some kind of shortcake. If you ask Japanese people to think of cake, many, many of them will think of strawberry shortcake first. Fujiya and Colombin are both famous bakeries, and Fujiya's mascot Peko is just EVERYWHERE. Cake made with sponge cake, red berries, and whipped cream has appeared in all sorts of media, including a certain game series. You know which one I mean.
Strawberry shortcake is easy on the eyes, as far as I'm concerned. It's red strawberries on white whipped cream---I had four cakes planned for Christmas and they were all blown away after I looked at a few little pictures of strawberry shortcake. No, I don't need pistachios or pudding cake. I. Need. Shortcake.
Quick notes for my own consumption
-syrup was good
-vanilla was really awesome
-do the hot water thing next time
This recipe is still being typed. I actually thought I should get rid of it because I might have posted something like this here before, but I don't have the heart to delete all this stuff I wrote. The amounts for everything are from the 21 centimeter cake that links from a link below, plus the ingredient described in step 19.
1. Melt the butter. I recommend putting it in a little bowl and microwaving it for 15-20 seconds.
2. Sift the flour. That's right, shut up and do it.
3. Grease the pan. Do it now. Also set the oven to 340 degrees.
4. Put the sugar in a bowl you can reach and pick up easily.
5. Note: this is the step I left out, and I would put the blame for a flat genoise here. Heat some water to 40 degrees celsius (104 fahrenheit) and have it in a bowl bigger than the bowl you'll use for most of the mixing. You will put the mixing bowl in this bigger bowl with the water so that the eggs will be get warm and hold more air.
6. Break the eggs into a nice big bowl that can more or less sit inside the bowl with the hot water. Get ready for some hard work---this time I put a glass of water aside for myself and when I drank it after I made the genoise, it was the most delicious water in the history of man.
7. Beat the eggs with an electric mixer as high as you dare. Start a little low until they get frothy, and beat the shit out of them. You must move the mixer while you run it on high, fast enough to tap the sides of the bowl. As you go, add 1/3 of the sugar at a time.
8. You are looking for a very, very pale yellow, almost white foam. If you stick a toothpick into the middle of the batter, it will stand. If you turn off the mixer and pull it out, the batter falling into the bowl will form big, thick ribbons or ropes that take a couple seconds to melt away. This is very, very important, because the eggs are the only thing that make this cake rise. If you don't beat them long enough, the cake will probably just taste like eggs and sugar, but it won't be light and it won't rise the way it should. If you aren't sure, look up how to make genoise on the interbutt, because there are blogs and videos that explain this better than I do. When you finish with this step, turn the mixer down as low as it goes and just give it a spin or two around the bowl to kill any large air bubbles.
9. When you have judged that the batter is done, gently sprinkle in the sifted flour, and fold it until it's smooth (or mostly combined, if you plan to add butter). You must be gentle, because the flour has to bond with the eggs before the egg bubbles break. But you must also be kinda fast about it, because EGGS, FOAM, DELICATE.
10. Opinions are divided on the stupid butter. For a while I didn't add any, and frankly the cake did more rising without it, but apparently snotty food people think sponge cake tastes stale without it. And it's butter, it tastes good. I dunno. It's up to you, but if you're not really sold you can do fine without it. If you add it here, fold it in gently.
11. Put the batter in the cake pan immediately, don't wait at all, and put it right in the oven. You may flatten out the batter a little if it isn't even. Cook it for about 30 minutes. You can check on it with a toothpick, or you can try lightly pressing a fingertip to the middle of the cake---if it springs back, it's done.
12. Put 60 milliliters of water and 50 milliliters of water in a sauce pan and heat it until it boils. You will make a light syrup that you will use later.
13. When your cake is done, get it out of the oven and immediately remove it from the pan so it can cool on a rack. Once you have gently put it on a rack, leave it the fuck alone. It should be room temperature before you move on.
14. Wash the strawberries. Pat them dry. Examine them. Are there some that don't look like octopuses? Do any look like triangles instead of trapezoids? Take out the nice, smooth, unbruised, clean, well-colored and well-shaped strawberries. These go on top of your cake. It depends on how big your cake is, but for this recipe I would want 8 medium-big ones, or 12 smaller ones.
15. Chop off the green leaves and stems of your strawberries---if there's any white stuff at the tops you can take off a little of that too. Put aside your pretty strawberries. Slash the ugly ones in half. If you can, try to cut them so that if you put the cut side down flat on something, they more or less come to the same height.
16. By now your cake is done cooling. Now you have to cut it in half. Remember that if you start cutting before the cake is really cool, the cake will be too delicate and you'll warp it in unspeakable ways. Get a sharp knife, A+ for a serrated knife, and cut it horizontally into two halves. If your cake is really high and you're ambitions, try for three. (Just put have more strawberries for the filling.)
17. Dab the syrup on the insides of both layers of cake with a big kitchen brush or something. You don't have to use all of it, but I did and it was good.
19. CAKE TECHNIQUE! HIOUGI! SWEET, ALCO, HOOOOOOL! Add about half a teaspoon of vanilla flavoring to the whipped cream. At the very least it should be nice vanilla flavoring, obviously in something alcoholic. Don't use something cheap. This will affect the entire cake, and it should be somethingthat raises your cake's stats worthy. If it's easier, use grand marnier, kirschwasser, or ESPECIALLY rum. Rum is awesome in cake, and you can drink it if you want to get rid of it a little faster. I like it with pineapple juice and blue curacao.
18. Add the sugar to the whipped cream (you can do it all at once this time) and beat it until it's 70~80% done. Any more and you run the risk of partially turning it into butter as you frost the cake.
18. Put the bottom layer of the cake on whatever plate you plan to serve it on. Put on a glob of whipped cream maybe the size of your fist (bigger is okay) and spread it into a thin even layer.
19. Arrange the cut strawberries on the layer of whipped cream. Put the flat, cut sides down with the points facing the center of the cake, and have them all be in circles. For this cake I had an inner ring and an outer ring of strawberries, and the inner ring definitely had fewer. Don't put strawberries right in the middle, or your cake will be harder to cut.
20. Put a nice big lump of frosting right in the middle of all those strawberries and start flattening it out with a spatula. If you have a turntable your life will be easy, if not I hear you can fake it on a smooth counter if you put a dish towel under the plate. In this part, you want to flatten the whipped cream so that it just covers the strawberries and fills in the spaces between them. Consider putting on a lot of whipped cream and stopping just before it hits the edges of the cake, though if you don't stop until it falls off the sides, that's fine too.
21. Take your top layer of cake and gently press it down on top of what you did in the last step, with the crumby side facing in. If you used extra whipped cream and didn't bring it right to the edge, it should push out to the edges on its own.
22. Get another big piece of whipped cream. Dump that in a ball on top of the cake and start seriously frosting it. Mostly you should start on the top and work down, so first flatten out the cream, letting it fall over the sides, and then run the knife around the edges to distribute the cream evenly and make nice flat sides.
23. Top with the pretty strawberries. I ask you to think: what do you want this mother to look like? Most strawberry shortcakes have a strawberry right in the middle of each piece, with its point reaching for the sky, and puffs of cream on either side. Scroll to the bottom here for another idea. If you have a nice even number of strawberries, like eight, you can just put one on every compass point and then another one in between each of those. One very common arrangement is round doots of cream under each strawberry. You can do this with a spoon if you're careful, and then all you do is gently, gently push down the strawberry into each blob so it sticks. Another one is putting all the strawberries in the middle, but expect to have to take your cake apart when you cut it. Make it so that it's pretty even without the next step.
24. If you have any piping tips for pastry or cake, you probably know what to do, so skip this. If not, get a ziplock bag or something with relatively thick plastic. Thinner bags are okay, but the thicker plastic feels like it gives more control without a proper tip. Shove the corner of one of these bags into a tall glass and open the top of the bag over the sides of the glass. Now you have something to hold the bag open while you load it with whipped cream. Use a spatula or a big spoon to do this, and don't put in too much at once. About half a bag's worth is great.
25. If you are using a ziplock bag, cut off one of the bottom tips to a size you like (1~1.5 cm is nice---start small). Squeeze the cream down towards that tip. Your author has a certain superstitious behavior of using an oven mitt to do most of the holding for this to shield the cream from the heat of her hands. If you're not fairly sure what you want, practice on something that is not your cake. Don't do TONS of practicing though, man. You need that whipped cream. Also get permission before you practice on people.
26. Pipe it out. Try to put doots of cream on symmetrically so if you run out it doesn't look like "oh shit I ran out of frosting lol." If you don't want cream under the strawberries, put the berries down first and then pipe on some cream. You pretty much just want neat puffs or blobs in a symmetrical shape. If you're ambitious you can try to give them little points. Put a bunch in the middle of the cake, because if you put the strawberries around the edges there'll be a big open space there and whipped cream won't interfere with cutting the cake (much).
27. If you are satisfied with the piping, or you just don't want to look at that thing anymore, move your cake carefully to the fridge and let it set. The cream is likely not as hard as it could be from being handled at room temperature, so if you cut it now the cake will explode.
28. Cut with an incredibly sharp knife. Don't bother with a hot knife. A serrated knife is what you really need, one that can cut strawberries and genoise. Gently saw away at it. Cut in between the strawberries on top of the cake. Try to get one strawberry on top of each piece---but if you find you have to have 2 on one big piece, you will be forgiven.
29. Serve upright on plates with forks. Have serious philosophical discussions about whether to eat the strawberry on top first or last, and what it says about one's destiny.
Is it okay if I have Speedy Cat stuck in my head? (今さら) How about if I think it's a perfect match for the new remix of idolm@ster? No?
Strawberry shortcake is everywhere in Japan. Pretty much every cafe and bakery will sell you some kind of shortcake. If you ask Japanese people to think of cake, many, many of them will think of strawberry shortcake first. Fujiya and Colombin are both famous bakeries, and Fujiya's mascot Peko is just EVERYWHERE. Cake made with sponge cake, red berries, and whipped cream has appeared in all sorts of media, including a certain game series. You know which one I mean.
Strawberry shortcake is easy on the eyes, as far as I'm concerned. It's red strawberries on white whipped cream---I had four cakes planned for Christmas and they were all blown away after I looked at a few little pictures of strawberry shortcake. No, I don't need pistachios or pudding cake. I. Need. Shortcake.
Quick notes for my own consumption
-syrup was good
-vanilla was really awesome
-do the hot water thing next time
This recipe is still being typed. I actually thought I should get rid of it because I might have posted something like this here before, but I don't have the heart to delete all this stuff I wrote. The amounts for everything are from the 21 centimeter cake that links from a link below, plus the ingredient described in step 19.
1. Melt the butter. I recommend putting it in a little bowl and microwaving it for 15-20 seconds.
2. Sift the flour. That's right, shut up and do it.
3. Grease the pan. Do it now. Also set the oven to 340 degrees.
4. Put the sugar in a bowl you can reach and pick up easily.
5. Note: this is the step I left out, and I would put the blame for a flat genoise here. Heat some water to 40 degrees celsius (104 fahrenheit) and have it in a bowl bigger than the bowl you'll use for most of the mixing. You will put the mixing bowl in this bigger bowl with the water so that the eggs will be get warm and hold more air.
6. Break the eggs into a nice big bowl that can more or less sit inside the bowl with the hot water. Get ready for some hard work---this time I put a glass of water aside for myself and when I drank it after I made the genoise, it was the most delicious water in the history of man.
7. Beat the eggs with an electric mixer as high as you dare. Start a little low until they get frothy, and beat the shit out of them. You must move the mixer while you run it on high, fast enough to tap the sides of the bowl. As you go, add 1/3 of the sugar at a time.
8. You are looking for a very, very pale yellow, almost white foam. If you stick a toothpick into the middle of the batter, it will stand. If you turn off the mixer and pull it out, the batter falling into the bowl will form big, thick ribbons or ropes that take a couple seconds to melt away. This is very, very important, because the eggs are the only thing that make this cake rise. If you don't beat them long enough, the cake will probably just taste like eggs and sugar, but it won't be light and it won't rise the way it should. If you aren't sure, look up how to make genoise on the interbutt, because there are blogs and videos that explain this better than I do. When you finish with this step, turn the mixer down as low as it goes and just give it a spin or two around the bowl to kill any large air bubbles.
9. When you have judged that the batter is done, gently sprinkle in the sifted flour, and fold it until it's smooth (or mostly combined, if you plan to add butter). You must be gentle, because the flour has to bond with the eggs before the egg bubbles break. But you must also be kinda fast about it, because EGGS, FOAM, DELICATE.
10. Opinions are divided on the stupid butter. For a while I didn't add any, and frankly the cake did more rising without it, but apparently snotty food people think sponge cake tastes stale without it. And it's butter, it tastes good. I dunno. It's up to you, but if you're not really sold you can do fine without it. If you add it here, fold it in gently.
11. Put the batter in the cake pan immediately, don't wait at all, and put it right in the oven. You may flatten out the batter a little if it isn't even. Cook it for about 30 minutes. You can check on it with a toothpick, or you can try lightly pressing a fingertip to the middle of the cake---if it springs back, it's done.
12. Put 60 milliliters of water and 50 milliliters of water in a sauce pan and heat it until it boils. You will make a light syrup that you will use later.
13. When your cake is done, get it out of the oven and immediately remove it from the pan so it can cool on a rack. Once you have gently put it on a rack, leave it the fuck alone. It should be room temperature before you move on.
14. Wash the strawberries. Pat them dry. Examine them. Are there some that don't look like octopuses? Do any look like triangles instead of trapezoids? Take out the nice, smooth, unbruised, clean, well-colored and well-shaped strawberries. These go on top of your cake. It depends on how big your cake is, but for this recipe I would want 8 medium-big ones, or 12 smaller ones.
15. Chop off the green leaves and stems of your strawberries---if there's any white stuff at the tops you can take off a little of that too. Put aside your pretty strawberries. Slash the ugly ones in half. If you can, try to cut them so that if you put the cut side down flat on something, they more or less come to the same height.
16. By now your cake is done cooling. Now you have to cut it in half. Remember that if you start cutting before the cake is really cool, the cake will be too delicate and you'll warp it in unspeakable ways. Get a sharp knife, A+ for a serrated knife, and cut it horizontally into two halves. If your cake is really high and you're ambitions, try for three. (Just put have more strawberries for the filling.)
17. Dab the syrup on the insides of both layers of cake with a big kitchen brush or something. You don't have to use all of it, but I did and it was good.
19. CAKE TECHNIQUE! HIOUGI! SWEET, ALCO, HOOOOOOL! Add about half a teaspoon of vanilla flavoring to the whipped cream. At the very least it should be nice vanilla flavoring, obviously in something alcoholic. Don't use something cheap. This will affect the entire cake, and it should be something
18. Add the sugar to the whipped cream (you can do it all at once this time) and beat it until it's 70~80% done. Any more and you run the risk of partially turning it into butter as you frost the cake.
18. Put the bottom layer of the cake on whatever plate you plan to serve it on. Put on a glob of whipped cream maybe the size of your fist (bigger is okay) and spread it into a thin even layer.
19. Arrange the cut strawberries on the layer of whipped cream. Put the flat, cut sides down with the points facing the center of the cake, and have them all be in circles. For this cake I had an inner ring and an outer ring of strawberries, and the inner ring definitely had fewer. Don't put strawberries right in the middle, or your cake will be harder to cut.
20. Put a nice big lump of frosting right in the middle of all those strawberries and start flattening it out with a spatula. If you have a turntable your life will be easy, if not I hear you can fake it on a smooth counter if you put a dish towel under the plate. In this part, you want to flatten the whipped cream so that it just covers the strawberries and fills in the spaces between them. Consider putting on a lot of whipped cream and stopping just before it hits the edges of the cake, though if you don't stop until it falls off the sides, that's fine too.
21. Take your top layer of cake and gently press it down on top of what you did in the last step, with the crumby side facing in. If you used extra whipped cream and didn't bring it right to the edge, it should push out to the edges on its own.
22. Get another big piece of whipped cream. Dump that in a ball on top of the cake and start seriously frosting it. Mostly you should start on the top and work down, so first flatten out the cream, letting it fall over the sides, and then run the knife around the edges to distribute the cream evenly and make nice flat sides.
23. Top with the pretty strawberries. I ask you to think: what do you want this mother to look like? Most strawberry shortcakes have a strawberry right in the middle of each piece, with its point reaching for the sky, and puffs of cream on either side. Scroll to the bottom here for another idea. If you have a nice even number of strawberries, like eight, you can just put one on every compass point and then another one in between each of those. One very common arrangement is round doots of cream under each strawberry. You can do this with a spoon if you're careful, and then all you do is gently, gently push down the strawberry into each blob so it sticks. Another one is putting all the strawberries in the middle, but expect to have to take your cake apart when you cut it. Make it so that it's pretty even without the next step.
24. If you have any piping tips for pastry or cake, you probably know what to do, so skip this. If not, get a ziplock bag or something with relatively thick plastic. Thinner bags are okay, but the thicker plastic feels like it gives more control without a proper tip. Shove the corner of one of these bags into a tall glass and open the top of the bag over the sides of the glass. Now you have something to hold the bag open while you load it with whipped cream. Use a spatula or a big spoon to do this, and don't put in too much at once. About half a bag's worth is great.
25. If you are using a ziplock bag, cut off one of the bottom tips to a size you like (1~1.5 cm is nice---start small). Squeeze the cream down towards that tip. Your author has a certain superstitious behavior of using an oven mitt to do most of the holding for this to shield the cream from the heat of her hands. If you're not fairly sure what you want, practice on something that is not your cake. Don't do TONS of practicing though, man. You need that whipped cream. Also get permission before you practice on people.
26. Pipe it out. Try to put doots of cream on symmetrically so if you run out it doesn't look like "oh shit I ran out of frosting lol." If you don't want cream under the strawberries, put the berries down first and then pipe on some cream. You pretty much just want neat puffs or blobs in a symmetrical shape. If you're ambitious you can try to give them little points. Put a bunch in the middle of the cake, because if you put the strawberries around the edges there'll be a big open space there and whipped cream won't interfere with cutting the cake (much).
27. If you are satisfied with the piping, or you just don't want to look at that thing anymore, move your cake carefully to the fridge and let it set. The cream is likely not as hard as it could be from being handled at room temperature, so if you cut it now the cake will explode.
28. Cut with an incredibly sharp knife. Don't bother with a hot knife. A serrated knife is what you really need, one that can cut strawberries and genoise. Gently saw away at it. Cut in between the strawberries on top of the cake. Try to get one strawberry on top of each piece---but if you find you have to have 2 on one big piece, you will be forgiven.
29. Serve upright on plates with forks. Have serious philosophical discussions about whether to eat the strawberry on top first or last, and what it says about one's destiny.
Is it okay if I have Speedy Cat stuck in my head? (今さら) How about if I think it's a perfect match for the new remix of idolm@ster? No?
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From:
no subject
I might try making this cake. I am good at following instructions.
I will document and show results. My cakes are always beautiful.
From:
no subject
This isn't a comment on how my directions have way too much detail? (I was tired and I like to talk.) I'm actually interested in hearing how it comes out.