Tea and Cake (or death?)

Hello! I hope you all are well. :) I'm unfortunately feeling a bit under the weather. Thankfully I don't have the cold/flu/whatever it is that's going around JCMU...just a really upset stomach and a lack of good sleep (3 days of not sleeping well will do that). My exam grade today probably suffered because of it because I decided to forgo studying in favor of sleep, but it will probably turn out okay.

Speaking of things that have turned out okay, I have 2 separate kitchen triumphs to talk about.

The first is just a quick one - Gyuudon was successful. It's basically thinly-sliced beef, onions, and mushrooms in a sweetish soy-based sauce(made from scratch, of course!). My roommate is allergic to beef and still was tempted to try it because it smelled so good. Definitely going in my recipe book.

And the second is carrot cake! :D

Let me first explain why making carrot cake was so difficult here in Japan. First, finding a recipe is a challenge. Japanese grocery stores have a lot of things! The problem is that the types of things they carry differ greatly from that of American grocery stores. So, my baking ingredients are a little limited. Any recipes with things like molasses, apple sauce, buttermilk, and the like are out because I just can't find them here. So, it took a while to find a simple-enough recipe (and you've already heard of my travails at the grocery store trying to find all of the ingredients).

Part 2 was the lack of utensils. Instead of an oven, we have a little convection oven (ie our microwave). It actually works just like a regular oven - you preheat it and then just set a bake time and it cooks. So, that was easier than I thought. Another problem is Japanese cake pans - they have a diameter of roughly 6.15 inches (which doesn't even translate to a round number in centimeters!). This is very different from the 8 or 9" pans we have. Japanese pans are also taller. Plus, my recipe suggested a 9x13 pan would be best to bake this cake in. That wasn't going to work. So now, I had no reliable batter amount (should I halve the recipe or leave it whole?), no reliable cook temperature AND no reliable cook time. Yay! Luckily, allrecipes.com came to my rescue (love that site, by the way - check it out sometime!) with a conversion article. While it didn't address Japanese cake pans (what a surprise!) I was able to apply the information and figured out that 2/3 of the batter amount would work (though measuring 2/3 of 4 eggs would be an interesting challenge).

Part 3: the mixing of the cake and icing. Of course, there were 3 more minor issues: I had no measuring spoons, so I just eyeballed the spice additions and hoped they would work out. AND I had no hand-mixer/wire whisk so the frosting had to be mixed with a fork. AND my grater was about the size of a can of soup (the small ones), so it took about 45 minutes to grate all the carrots.

By the end, it actually started to look like carrot cake. I was getting pretty hopeful. All that was left was the baking. I decided to stick with 180 degrees Celsius (roughly 350 degrees) for 20 minutes. The bottom tier took about 28 minutes and the top tier took more like 35 (because there was more batter in the pan the second time). But they came out beautifully golden brown so I was happy. All that was left was the icing and then the taste-testing.

Success. :) Because I'm nitpicky, I found the cake to be a little denser than I wanted, and lacking in a bit of cinnamon or salt (or probably both) - the cream cheese frosting wasn't too cream-cheesy, either. But it was pretty darn tasty, and neither undercooked nor burnt. And, most importantly, my roommate loved it.

In other news, today we had our second cultural presentation - tea ceremony! It's a very ritualistic tradition that's now mainly done as a hobby in Japan. The tea you drink is macha, or green tea. It's a lot stronger than the stuff we have in the US, and pretty bitter. I'm starting to acquire the taste, though.

We performed the tea ceremony in the tatami room, a special room in the academic building designed like an old-fashioned Japanese room. It has tatami floors and rice-paper sliding screen doors, and is only opened for special occasions. Very cool. :)

The ladies performed the ceremony for us twice - the second time, we got to join in. Traditionally you're served a season-specific sweet in addition to the green tea. We had "Nightingale mochi", so named because nightingales are some of the first birds to be heard in the spring. The treat is mochi (a gluey dough made from rice) filled with the red bean paste I've talked about before (yum) and coated in some kind of soybean that tastes like the green tea. You're supposed to eat the snack to sort of counteract the bitterness of the tea to come.
All in all, I enjoy watching tea ceremonies. They're very unique, and I love the exactitude the ceremony requires. It's like a very well-choreographed dance performance, and the guest has a part to play in the ritual as much as the host. There's a specific method to pouring the hot water, serving the tea, drinking the tea, and even eating the dessert ("okashi" in Japanese; it refers to any small sweet snack and is such a lovely word. ;)).

The rest of my day should be fun, provided I'm feeling better. Tonight I'm playing 42 with people (its popularity is spreading!), then we're going out to a bar for my roommate's 21st birthday. Considering I've never been to a bar, this will be an experience in more ways than one. XD The drinking age in Japan is 20, so turning 21 isn't as big of a deal here but she intends to celebrate like crazy anyway. :) I think it will be fun.

Happy Friday! (or, at least, Happy Almost Friday.) Enjoy your weekend. :)