Fun with cakes
Apologies for the absence - I have been rather busy again. It’s the last week of term so there have been a lot of Christmas lessons that I had to get off my arse and plan for, end of year parties, and general end of year faff that needs to be taken care of. Thanks to all those people who voted. Although it doesn’t look like I’m going to win it pleasingly stirs the usual dull hollowness inside my soul to know that there are over 90 different people who visit my site who were enthusiastic enough about this place to give it a vote. Also thanks to Giles from http://www.misohoni.com for nominating me in the first place. Thank you all - if I ever met any of you in real life I would take extra care not to accidentally throw bricks in your face or whatever.
Anyhoo.
I suffer from a rare condition which has no name and is also entirely fictitious, but nonetheless, I suffer from it. I have this tendency to make really rash decisions and not really bother about the consequences - a spontaneity syndrome, if you will. Thankfully it is never over anything important - the kind of things I mean are the sudden decision to go out and buy a magazine about fishing, to clean my computer with car polish or to drive up to Fukuoka for absolutely no reason other than to just- go there.
So we come to this, the time of Christmas / Advent where I have been thinking about Christmas goodwill gestures again. Last year you see, I made a kind of Christmas-tasting fudge for my Junior High school teachers and students, and this year I wanted to do something similar. How warm my heart of stone is! It’s like that bit at the end of the He-man Christm- oh wait I’ve done that reference FRICK YOU I HAVE THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT COMING OUT OF EVERY PORE. Like a kind of festive discharge.
Thus rewind to last week, Tuesday, around 8:30pm. Sitting on the sofa idly tapping on the icicles forming on my brow, I suddenly sprang up from my seat and proclaimed:
“I’m going to make a CAKE!”
And so it started. I decided to make Christmas cakes for my schools. I thought it would be sooo simple. But oh how I was wrong.
Approximately 5 seconds after entering my kitchen I realised that I had never made a Christmas cake before - nay, my experience in cake-making on the whole is only slightly more than totally non-existent (I think I’ve made some Pilsbury cookies once. That is, I took them out of the tub and put them in the oven). As I thought harder about this, I remembered that Christmas cakes (at least the ones in England) have a very distinct taste - and had some doubts as to whether I would be able to recreate this. I found myself wondering what IS that magic ingredient that tastes of Christmas. Could it be reindeer sperm? Powdered Elf nipple? Essence of Sleigh? Reindeer sperm? No, it is none of those things, but they do share some common traits with the actual Christmas cake ingredients in that both kinds are completely impossible for me get without going to great lengths. Ah and herein lies the conundrum - whilst this spontaneity syndrome fills me with a certain amount of enthusiasm to do even the lamest of things, there will at the same time be a distinct threshold of whether or not I can, in reality, actually be fricked to do it.
So let’s take this cake as a textbook example. The ingredients you need to make a basic Christmas cake, other than the usual cake stuff, are (probably) rum, lots of different dried fruits, various spices and treacle. None of these I have in my house, or are easily attainable at 8pm at night in the middle of Japan’s u-bend, so I had to improvise, lest my brain explode from giving up on the self-induced enthusiasm. Firmly believing in the axiom that something can be more than the sum of it’s parts, I looked around my kitchen for suitable substitutes for real ingredients. In the absence of rum, I turned to the only other spirit in my house, that being vodka. I guess I could have used that vile Mangosteen liqueur from summer but that really would have caused a culinary tragedy of biblical proportions, which I wasn’t quite ready to face. In the place of dried fruits, I used raisins. This is an acceptable substitute, since raisins are dried fruits, and using ingredients that are in fact the same as the ingredients you actually need is good cooking common sense.
For spices, I turned to my pitiful, sun-bleached (it’s RIGHT by the window) spice ‘rack’. I say ‘rack’ because it’s more like a flimsy Tupperware box with some bottles of herbs and spices piled in a craphazard fashion in varying stages of emptyness. None of these spices were suitable for baking, since they were either savoury spices or just bleached beyond recognition. Thus I omitted spices. Treacle, oh how you be my nemesis, was the final ingredient and the one I dreaded the most, for this would be impossible to find even if my can-be-fricked threshold was a little higher and I was willing to leave the house to buy ingredients. Treacle is one of those ethereal foreign foods that you just WON’T FIND in Japan unless you are in a foreign food store or perhaps a specialist-baking store. And for that you will need to be in a big city which I, hahahahaha hahahahhaha hahahAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA am not in, so I had to improvise. This is my exact internal monologue, verbatim:
“Treacle, huh. Treacle makes the cake brown. Brown and sweet- brown and sweet- ” “You know what else is brown and sweet..? Think- think- there is something else you have that you can use” “Who are you?” “I’m your penis” “I didn’t know penises could talk. And I know everything, because I’m the brain. Heh. No I mean literally, I’m the brain - right now it is the brain who is speaking. I am the brain.” “I got it” “Ok so anyway this treacle thing- brown and sweet- ” “I asked you a question, brain - do you know what else is brown and sweet?” “uh- uh- s-shit?” “No, you fricking freak. What the hell is wrong with you?” “I thought this was going to be some kind of lame penis in-joke.” “Or maybe you were just saying what you really think, which obviously means you have eaten shit” “I can’t eat anything, I’m a brain. I have no mouth.” “That’s true. I bet you think about eating shit a lot though” “Shut up, you cock” “Me oh my that’s originality right there.”
So, as you can see, listening to my internal monologue was absolutely useless. However, I had a cunning plan. Riding on the breakthrough that treacle makes the cake brown and sweet, it didn’t take me long to think of another ingredient that in my tiny, tiny inexperienced brain seemed like an ideal substitute. Brown + Sweet = Chocolate. Luckily I had a lot of that lying around, so I melted some up in a jiffy.
I’m sure many of you can see the transition happening now before your very eyes, from lofty aspirations of a moist and festive Christmas cake to some kind of bastard chocolate vodka thing. Alarm bells should have sounded in my head when it took all of 20 seconds to mix everything together with all the finesse of a 3-year old making food out of dirt and slam it in the oven, for this is not how great culinary creations are made. In the end, the cake, in summary, was nothing short of a complete disaster.
If ever there was a food that could simultaneously look like some kind of disturbing loaf of bread whilst also resembling the food version of the creature from Carpenter’s The Thing, the end product of this little experiment was it. The Cake. Noting to myself that delicious things can sometimes look unappealing, I did a taste test. The results were predictably hideous. The Cake, which had taken on an extremely bitter taste from- somewhere- had a flavour and a general eating characteristic not unlike that of RAW COFFEE.
So I ended up giving that one to the elementary school teachers.
After several cakes, Cakes and brushes with death by intestinal dysentery, I actually improved on the original recipe quite substantially - basically by purchasing actual ingredients. And thus, this week is cake-making week as I make these things for my 2 other schools and my 2 eikaiwa classes.
That’s the ‘giving’ aspect of Christmas out the way, I’m ready for the goddamn ‘receiving’ now. Speaking of receiving (phnar!) I’m off on holiday to Singapore to see my girlfriend at the end of this week. Usual holiday rules apply - I won’t be around for a while yadda yadda. I’ll post one more entry just before I leave, to give you all my seasons greetings.
OH DEAR GOD I JUST WROTE 1000 WORDS ABOUT CAKES.
