white chocolate cake

From Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking, Harumi Kurihara. Oddly, I read the reviews on Amazon after I bought the book. That was stupid. Turns out the book is very well reviewed. Lots of reviews, all five stars, and that's unusual.

Harumi's idea for this cake appealed to me because of its simplicity. Egg, flour, white chocolate, scant sugar. That's all. I thought, "Hmm, how very Japanese, no leavener beyond the egg. ." Strange, no oil, very little sugar. No salt.

That's just wrong.

Result: (whispers) Not very good. (/whisper) Any boxed cake would be better, and I mean any boxed cake. And that's a shame. This cake is too dense, too heavy, too dry. It's hopeless. I doused the cake with half a cup of Grand Marnier and half a cup of simple suger (which ah made mahself -- 1/2 cup sugar + 1/2 cup water, brought to boil) After all that the cake was still too dense and too dry. No sense of white chocolate. It's awful.

I'll say this, though, the raw batter tasted very good.

I forgot to dust with powdered sugar for a final touch, which Hurami does for her lovely book so her picture is prettier than mine. Her recipe is for 8x8 pan, I used 9x9 so I doubled the recipe but I did not increase the baking time. That is not the reason the cake is so dense. Also I used 1/2 AP flour and 1//2 cake flour. Her recipe calls for 100% AP so by all lights and logic mine should have been more tender, but it's not tender. Not by a long shot. Huuuuck-ptewie. It's gross.

If I were to attempt this again, and there's no reason I should, I would back off the egg, include more vegetable oil and add baking powder, and I'd use 100% low-protein cake flour. Taa daaa. That right there would fix it. I'd also might whip the egg white separately from the yolk then fold the components together and bake it less than 20 minutes. I'd also use more white chocolate, or consider a white chocolate ganache layer. Let's face it, Japanese are not known for their wheat flour products, nor for their chocolate, so I'll cut Harumi some slack here and leave it at that.

Harumi's recipe:

1/4 cup good-quality white chocolate

1 cup AP flour

3 eggs

1/4 cup granulated sugar

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3/4 cup heavy whipping cream

2 tablespoons ganulated sugar

blueberries, mint leaves, powdered sugar to dust.

Bake 20 minutes at 350℉ / 177℃

* Preheat oven.

* Sift flour into a bowl mix in cold grated chocolate

* Separate bowl, beat eggs and sugar. Whisk until it stands in peaks. Stir in 1/2 flour white chocolate mixture.

* Add remaining flour lightly mix.

* Transfer mixture to baking pan. Tap pan on work surface to break bubbles. Bake

* Remove from oven. Put on rack. Cool. Wrap in plastic to keep from drying out.

* Whip cream and sugar. Spread. Place berries and mint.

OK, here's what's wrong with this.

1) Eggs with their yolks will not whip to stiff peaks. Fugitaboudit. They will whip up, but not to stiff peaks. Six jumbo eggs is more than any quiche would even call for. (Except Vincent Price's quiche. Price's quiche calls for eight egg yolks, or possibly twelve, I forget. At any rate, it's an unusual lot and probably bad for you besides, itself a culinary horror.)

2) It's no use covering it with plastic to prevent it from drying out. It's already exceedingly dry. So dry in fact that an entire cup of extra liquid did not moisten a double batch. Blah.

My recipe that failed and would have got me promptly expelled from Le Cordon Bleu along with my knives. POW! "Sortez. Et ne revenez pas." Get out! And don't come back."

Derisively, "American. Pfffft. "

* Half cup grated white chocolate

* 1 cup sifted AP flour

* 1 cup sifted low-protein cake flour

* 6 jumbo eggs

* 1/2 cup fine granulated sugar

* 1/8 cup vegetable oil

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topping as above.

Cake bakers can tell by looking, this is dreadfully woefully insufficient and now I do too. I think I'll toss the rest of this and chalk it up to experience. I'm glad a party wasn't involved. I look at it this way; I paid a lot more dearly for education in college. After that, everything is bargain.