Sw’hits 2013

Favorite desserts and sweet treats of the passed year.

A delicious brioche sweet bread, ideal fruity treat for the season.

It’s garnished with one of these superb akibae apples.

To get a delicious fluffy dough, the main ingredient is time.
One day, you mix yeast, sugar, water and flour to make a sponge. The next day, you make a dough. Two days later you bake it. The net day you enjoy the delight.
300 g bread flour
1/2 cup of yeast “sponge”.
40 g sugar
80 g butter
1 egg + 1 white
about a cup of milk

It’s filled with cubes of apple, many. Also, cocoa chips, Grand-Marnier soaked raisins, cinnamon.

On top, sliced almonds, sugar, cinnamon.

Really, be patient, as it gets so much better a whole day after baking.

Etxeko biskotxa : the Basque pie invasion !

My etxeko biskotxa. Home-made gâteau basque. No, you’re never too rich. Particularly if you’re a cake. Or if the currency of your fortune is a delicious specialty…

Yes. I have 5 ! But they are small. And I shared. And they could have been bigger and I could have not shared and eaten them all too…

Vanilla cream. This is the classic ! There is a good recipe given by the museum dedicated to this pastry.

Framboise (raspberry) and cassis (black currants). Bought jams.

Home-made ume plum jam to fill the 4th type :

Yes, that makes 5. There were 2 vanilla ones.

They call me ‘shoe cream’… Puff cake blues.

Les choux à la crème are probably the most successful French cake in Japan. Chou was easy to pronounce, but à la crème was too long. Everybody knew that meant cream. So the name became シュークリーム shu-kuri-mu chou cream, which is also how they say “shoe cream”.

Well we can see them everywhere from the luxury hotel tea room to the discount kombini (convenience store). They can be extraordinary, great, good, meh, abominable. The choice is huge. Some stands prepare them fresh all day.
I still find home-made fresher.

First let’s make the little choux. Then a cream at local taste including anko (azuki bean sweet paste) an ingredient borrowed from wagashi (Japanese tea sweets).

Simple, 125 g of water, 25 g of oil, 80 g of flour. I included about 2 eggs, a little vanilla extract and sugar.

Baked at 200 degrees, 25 minutes.

I really love the inside still wet. So I don’t fill them, I keep the cream on the side.

I passed boiled azuki beans through a sieve to get the creamy texture, added sugar and a little brandy. That’s koshian (‘passed’ bean paste, recipe here). More about it here.