Stomachs on legs are proud to present

I've already documented my devotion to heavenly Japanese sponge cakes. I didn't think it could get any better - but it just did.

We had colleagues (or should I say 'alcoholleagues') visit from Japan, and they brought with them a bottle of sake and this wonderful alcohol-infused sponge as souvenirs. How could the sponge retain that dense, yet very fine and soft melt-in-your-mouth texture while stored indefinitely in foil, stewing in its own tipsy juices?

The taste was, like any good castella: lovely, light and a little eggy, with only a yeasty hint of methylated spirits from the booze.
(Note: I think the soaking alcohol may have been shochu, but would love if Nalika can provide insight here).

Each square of this palm-sized cake really packed a punch. I wish there was a way to mail-order it from Japan.

Inspired by kinakoJam's entry, a little googling of 一六タルト (Ichi[1] Roku[6] Taruto) has brought me some wonders...



Apparently, it has become one of the "yuru chara" ('loose' mascot character) of Ehime prefecture in Shikoku region.

Like castella, it it supposedly inspired by the Portuguese upon their arrival to Nagasaki port in the 17th century.

The name taruto comes from torta/tarte, and it has been localized by adding red bean jam with a hint of yuzu, famous citrus from Shikoku.


It goes out on the street...




And it even goes to take HIV exam with other yuru chara's.




Amazing Japan.


Itami Juzo used to appear on the TV commercial series - he went to high school in Matsuyama, where this cake is famous.

I enjoy learning kanji, in a masochistic kind of way, but lately I am starting to wonder if I'll ever graduate from, say, reading the ingredients on the back of instant egg soup packets. There are just so many kanji to learn, and so few spare hours in the day. No surprise, then, that I botched my New Year's calligraphy attempt at Mamecha café in Berlin last week.
Maybe it's just a challenge that I'm not meant to overcome in this lifetime.

I feel similarly about sponge cake.
Particularly castella, the very soft yet densely-crumbed Japanese sponge derived from a Spanish or Portuguese recipe in Nagasaki quite a few centuries ago. There are many recipes I'm willing to attack in the name of creative reconstruction, but castella is not one of them. There just wouldn't be any point in creating a cake that was anything less than pristine and box-fresh.

I've been doing Japanese night classes lately, and tonight our teacher served up pieces of an Ichi Roku Taruto cake that she'd bought when visiting her parents over new years. The rolled sponge was like a next level castella.
Flavoured with yuzu citrus and rolled with azuki bean paste, its unearthly uniform perfection was like a fleeting dream: the essence of everything beautiful that we will never quite find the time for.

Spokane karaoke-killing DJ/psyche-boogie frontman/producer James Pants has just released his new cult-inspired LP 'Seven Seals' on Stones Throw. It's definitely one of my albums of the year, packed with new wave despondency, Pharrell-like synth shards and old-fashioned broken disco. Two of my fave tunes on the album have a slight food twist: titled 'I Live Inside An Egg', and 'A Chip In The Hand'. Mystic Pizza should've sounded like this.

Pants' mom supposedly made him the cultish cupcakes above - but judging from the instructional James Pants curry video below, I have a sneakish suspicion of who really baketh the spiderweb cakes around thither.

Over the last month or two I have taken time out from my afterwork curriculum to practice being a little bit more German. It's difficult to say what prompted this. For a long time I felt that I ended up in this country by accident rather than choice. For a few years, I felt comfortable as a citizen of no-place. But something seems to have shifted. I don't feel like I'll ever want to become German per se, but I finally feel at home enough that I allow myself a certain adopted pride for some of those quaint, old-fashioned customs... like making baked apples stuffed with rosehips, marzipan and hazelnuts, or autumn flower arrangements that include tiny crab apples.

After four years of living in Cologne, I've finally committed to my bicycle as a means of daily transport - using a 2nd hand foldable '50s klapprad to traverse the terrifyingly fast bicycle lanes and negotiate traffic (preferably with Erik alongside me as bikecoach).

In order to make my work-permit stick like glue, I recently participated in a nine-day state-subsidised integration course. I was hoping to be schooled in sausage varieties, but instead bonded with Phillipino, Jamaican, Dominican Republican and Kurdish classmates over parliamentary processes and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

At the start of the first day of our integration course, the tutor, a nice Turkish man named Herr Kaygisiz, asked us what we thought was typically German. Naturally, the first things that sprang to my mind were beer & cake.

Although I never drank beer before moving to Germany, I now enjoy a daily schwarzbier or pils. Unfortunately I don't like the local brew Kölsch so much.

Cake is a bit more difficult. Although my friends might deny it, cake still plays an integral or even iconic role in the lives of young Germans. Our pals love to spend an occasional Sunday eating cake, drinking coffee and gossiping the afternoon away. Below is a picture of Carmen's birthday tea-break - a symphony of cake.



For my own part, I would usually rather eat a sandwich. Although I admire many German cakes - rustic, not too sweet, using yeasted bases and seasonal fruit like zwetschgen plums, or copious poppyseeds or light quark cheesecake formulas - I am not a committed cake fan. Manufactum has one apple, walnut & poppyseed cake that I especially love (in photo below, with a crust of poppyseeds like purple volcanic sand). But I have never felt the need to bake a German cake.



I bake very rarely, and when I do it tends to be things like strawberry-lavender muffins, sweet potato pie, or blueberry-molasses cake, from Canadian or American books and websites. This is my habit generally when cooking - to make food I can't buy around the corner from my house. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, but of course going against the local culinary grain is also a way of satisfying nostalgia and creating a bubble in which to feel at home when you live abroad.

So for my birthday in early August, we made a nostalgic yum cha homage lunch: steamed buns, scallop shiu-mai, chinese broccoli and black sesame dumplings all made from scratch (to my chagrin it turned out Erik is much more talented at dumpling construction than me). It was a perfect lazy Sunday. And the German birthday cake that Ina brought along turned out to be the perfect dessert to follow this meal. A coconut-date cake, it was very light, fluffy and moist - so moist it was almost juicy in texture, rather than crumbly and cakey, and exactly as I like it: not too sweet.

Although I am quite keen to experiment with poppyseed-streaked muffins, if there is any cake that might start me on a path of German baking, I think it will be this delightful coconut-buttermilk-date cake.

INA'S COCOS-BUTTERMILK-DATE CAKE

Ingredients:
3 eggs
1 & 1/4 cups raw sugar (or more, to taste)
2 cups buttermilk
4 cups flour
22 g, 5.25 tsp or 1 & 1/2 packets of German baking powder (supposedly American/UK baking powder is 'double-acting', so you might use less than this recipe calls for - perhaps 4 teaspoons)
2 cups dessicated coconut
1/2 cup sugar (or more, to taste)
1/2 cup chopped dried dates
400 ml cream (or two 'becher' pottles)

Mix the first five ingredients together and pour into a greased pan. Mix the coconut, sugar and dates together and spread over the top. Bake for around 30 minutes at 140 degrees.
As soon as you remove it from the oven, pour 400 ml cream over top and let cool.

You could try it with beer I guess, but we enjoyed it with a 2008 Rheinhesser Grauer Burgunder (a dry Pinot Grigio). The cake-baker is pictured with her family below.

If you catch a boat to Mülheim on the wrong side of the tracks (or more correctly, the wrong side of the Rhein) in Cologne, you can pick up a football team, spongebob, spiderman or mowgli cake.
But my fave was definitely the cellphone cake, because nothing says "I care" like a hunk of outdated technology. I think the icing says: "Oh it's you.. how did you get this number?"



As Michael von Aichberger noted, people who live in Mülheim call themselves Mülleimer, which sounds a lot like the German word for trash can: Müll-Eimer. But Mülheim is really a great place. You can catch a boat there for four euros.

Kat!Heath! is a London-based DJ and Central Saint Martins-trained theatre designer. Her interests include "Earl grey, long hot baths, supermarket reduced sections, pimping shit up," and making hats (she majored in millinery at the Wimbledon School of Art).

I was reading about Kat's latest sound installation/guerilla theatre performance, and came across these great Nagi Noda-esque cake hat photos. I asked if I could blog them and she kindly obliged: what's more, she suggested that next time we catch up she might make some barbeque millinery for the occasion! Kind of like a dream I had once - but better!

About these photos, Kat says: "This was such a fun shoot. I spent hours and hours baking before hand without having slept much the night before though and forgot about the condensed milk I was boiling for the banoffi pie which exploded all over the kitchen. I had to wake everyone up and get them to help me mop the ceiling. Niamh and I are starting a clubnight in August and after I told her this story we have decided to call it 'Hot Toffee'."

The lemony cake in the foreground is intriguing - probably pieces of lime rind on top, but also looks quite a lot like strips of jalapeno chile, which could be a very good idea indeed.



Millinery, Styling, Set, Baking - Katharine Heath katheath@gmail.com
Photographer - Emily Barnett emilymarybarnett@yahoo.co.uk
Hair and Make-up - Clare Elizabeth
Models (L-R)- Kay Sayer, Fiona Albrow, Eleanor Wdowski
Kay's World-famous Victoria Sponge (centre) - Kay Sayer

Hats made to order katheath@gmail.com

If you're ready for a sugar rave rush, listen to Kat's radio show.

Japan is really amazing about having almost every edible thing from around the world, of course, if you are ready to pay for it.

One of the cravings I have not been able to fulfill, even in the cosmopolitan Bangkok (or perhaps I just do not know the right place), is Baumkuchen. So, on my recent trip to Japan, I was looking forward to satisfy my Baumkuchen cravings.

While Juchheim is one of the first to introduce Baumkuchen to Japan and is all over the place in department stores, I thought I'd check out what else is available.

I was amazed by the number and variety of Baumkuchen available throughout Japan. Wow! Hundreds. Even Juchheim alone has several different types of Baumkuchen which started to make me dizzy. I almost think there are more Baumkuchen sold in Japan than in Germany.

There are even websites dedicated to Baumkuchen, such as バウムクーヘン三昧, in which they sometimes even organize Baumkuchen get-together offiline meetups!

After checking out nearly twenty Baumkuchen shops, I ordered one from K.B.Kaiser in Kobe.


Kobe, having been a port town, has many great German bakeries including Juchheim and Freundlieb. My family friend used to send us Freundlieb's Stollen as winter oseibo.


Vacuum-packed in "eco package" - they have fancier regular fare with a cookie on top, but this one's good enough for me.



Isn't it beautiful?

My workmate Niklas is in a band called Locas in Love and they're playing a show tonight at Altes Pfandhaus in the Südstadt (an old pawn shop turned into a small seated concert venue).

(The photo above is of his other band, Karpatenhund, eating cake at one of Cologne's nicest small konditorein, Café Walden)

Below is a new Locas in Love video where they are singing about the pleasures of winter connected to frozen lakes and staying indoors to make cookies. Niklas is the blonde one on the left chucking the cookie dough around blithely.

In the second video, Niklas is grilling something next to the river Rhein. It appears to be chestnuts. He is serving them with tea (or coffee?), what looks like 'lebkuchen' (spicy christmas cookies), and a little bit of pathos.


Locas In Love - Wintersachen from Locas In Love on Vimeo.


Locas In Love - Roder from Locas In Love on Vimeo.

Occasionally I stumble across something on the Internets that is so truly awesome and frightening that I don't know what on earth I'm going to do about it. And so then I just link to it here at Gut Feelings. I present to you Cake Wrecks: when professional cake decorating goes so very, very wrong.

Introducing Metzgerei Schmitz, once a butcher belonging (presumably) to a gentleman named Schmitz, it's now an organic cafe and the best place to spy hipsters, quiche and steak-frites in Cologne.

In summer its prime west-facing position means its kerb-side tables are at a premium all afternoon.

I was never a huge fan of quiche, but I must say the quiche offerings of Metzgerei Schmitz have come to occupy a special place in my heart, because they are hardly eggy at all, and the buttery crusts are packed with big colourful chunks of veges and things. I especially love the one with beetroot topped with a few thin strips of roasted camembert and sprigs of freshly snipped thyme - and the one pictured below, which has gorgonzola, leeks and small round grapes. Yummy.



It's asparagus time once again, and the best I've had so far this season was for breakfast at Schmitz: a delightful omelette, asparagus 'gratineed' with a sprinkling of parmesan, and crostini piled with balsamicky tomato and basil.



Generally I hold cake & hipsters in the same regard (can be pretty to look at, but have to be in the mood for them). The cakes at Schmitz are a little on the sweet side for me but they are very beguiling to look at. The one below has a nutty crust and the berries are johannisbeeren, which are tart jewel-like red currants.



Their Italian sandwiches are also quite decent too, I like the softness of the argentinian roast beef focaccia, and you can get them with Merguez sausage, or goats cheese and honey.



Metzgerei Schmitz is at 28 Aachenerstrasse, it has a bigger brother next door called Salon Schmitz but the bigger spot lacks the 'gemütlichkeit' of the original.

West Auckland bakeries finest "Long Lamington" $5.50 NZD

After being inspired by Kinakojams post on the yet to be tasted but much drooled over Pastel de Belém, I decided to negotiate Bangkok's traffic to pick up an egg tart for myself. Usually obtaining a tart requires eating your way through a medicinal Sunday morning yum cha session, where the hopes of multiple dim sum might cure that hangover. None of that is required here, the most difficult task was to find a park for my scooter. That accomplished I headed upstairs to the Saladaeng BTS station where The Ceylon is located and made my purchase of their fantastic works of art which have the added bonus of being kept dangerously warm for your eating pleasure.

What I like most about these tarts is that the curd is scorched much like a Pastel de Belém, instead of the often pale egg tarts that you usually find elsewhere.

Yummy! Worth the 30 baht and near death experience.

Is right in the heart of Bangkok's Japanese expat residential area.

Bangkok has one of the highest Japanese expat populations on account of the car manufacturing industry here

The Japanese have also had undue influence over the bakery sector

Pretty much all Thai bakeries and bread preferences fall into the Japanese category

There's no crumbling crust here, it's all sweetness and light, puffy and cakey

I personally don't mind Japanese style bread, but it is necessary to throw out all your preconceived notions of what good bread is before you go and sample Japanese bakery delights.....I feel that this may be harder for some nationalities than others (especially the French)

There are a few notable exceptions however. The Japanese custard caramel is one.



This one bought at Custard Nakamura, was about as true to form as any French made cream caramel could be, the custard was creamy and not too sweet, the caramel was slighly bitter and coated the custard with the perfect consistency



We sampled some other stricly Japanese bakery items too including sakura choux pastry, japanese curry steamed bun and a weird teriayaki pork burger sandwich

we bought the piggy cup at a 50 baht shop selling all manner of useless and useful Japanese household items, also on Soi 33 1/2

I never used to drink spirits straight.

But ever since Cambodia, I've been partial to single malt scotch - straight up - and calvados, straight too

I guess the old fogies in my anthropology department were partially right, field work makes you a man...grrrrrrrr...arghhhh!

So my pops just came back from a holiday to Scotland and bought me 2 bottles of the premium stuff, and we had an impromptu whiskey tasting the other night.




Verdicts:

The Talisker is very peaty....manly stuff.

The Glenlivet Nadurra is smooth with honey accents.

Scapa is in between Talisker and Nadurra.

It all went very well with last year's Xmas cake sent from Green Dean.

Apparently, today is National Lamington Day in Australia



Although New Zealanders eat them too, unlike the Pavolva they are not subject to the same nationalistic claims of origin

"Lamington cakes are 2" cubes of sponge cake with a chocolate and coconut coating. They originated around 1898 in what later became the state of Queensland. They were named after Lord Lamington, a popular governor of that colony. The chocolate icing keeps the cake moist. It protects it from drying out in the hot climate. Lamingtons are the most popular fund-raising item for school groups, scouts and girl guides. Bake the cake 24 hours before icing it. A slightly stale cake is easier to cut and frost, and the icing moistens it up again."

recipe

I'm not the biggest fan of lamingtons....I prefer a pav...but that's niether here nor there...I'd eat one for a good cause which apparently is the point of the day...to fundarise for kiddies

I was reading Coco's post and waxing nostalgic about those little mini doughnuts they made at kiwi school fairs and pretty much any public gathering.

In Germany, you can get cold donuts from bakeries (glazed or cinnamon donuts), but top consumption goes to the Berliner
(known as jelly donut in the States, though I'm having a serious memory block over what we call them in NZ. I think they are known as another animal to the ring-shaped and dusted variety, right?)
In Germany when it comes to bakeries the Berliner rules the roost. Witness the huge glass walled stacks of them at Merzenich chain bakeries for ambling shoppers and children of shoppers. Rather gothically, their jelly filling is injected with a large syringe post cooking.



But when cruising Christmas markets and malls or supermarkets, for your hot fried and/or doughy treat, you will have much more luck finding either waffles or (mostly at Christmas time) the delicious 'reibekuchen'.

A typical scene at the entrance of Kaiser's supermarkets:



The waffles are of course very good, especially when accompanied with a thick cherry compote like the ones at local theme park Fantasialand. (The waffles are pretty much the highlight of Fantasialand by the way, though supposedly Michael Jackson is a big fan of their roller coasters. But the Chinese acrobats in the Chinatown section performing to high speed euro pop in faded neon leotards? How hokey)

Getting back to the important stuff (i.e. fried treats), Reibekuchen - grated potato pancakes served scalding hot with apple mousse - are damn good.

Basically,
this:



leads to this:




and it all ends in this:




Super on a freezing night with a cup of Glühwein.

Here is a recipe for banana-lemon waffles from a woman living in Berlin

Warning - the language in this video is not safe for work, young children or your grandma.