My Not-So-Successful Attempts at celebrating spring

By this time, I was getting sick of snow. It's been an unusually cold year so far--I've mentioned in my previous blog that many of the vegetable seedlings weren't growing. Well, things started to warm up FINALLY the past week. I wanted to celebrate the coming of spring with something spring-y--and nothing screams "SPRING IS HERE!!" more than sakura blossoms (at least in Japan).
There are packets of sakura leaves and salted blossoms that have been hibernating in our fridge for who knows how long. I wanted to use that to make a cake. There were leftover egg whites, so an angel food cake would be a good choice, I thought. Mom made some shiro-an (white anko made from lima beans) so I thought about mixing in the blossoms into that, and using it as a filling...
And to really impart that cherry blossom fragrance, I wanted to incorporate the leaves into the batter somehow.
I laid out the leaves on the baking pan, and panned out the angel food cake batter over it, and baked it. When I took it out, the cake had this wonderful smell of the sakura! I was pretty stoked at first...unfortunately, this cake turned out to be a culinary fiasco.

I wanted to make the cake into a jelly roll, so I rolled up the cake while warm. Big mistake. For this amount of batter (I used 1/2 recipe), it's not enough to provide the structural support it needs to be formed into a jellyroll--in other words, the cake flattened into a crepe. That's right, thinner than your average pancake. And once it's this thin, an angel food cake, which is mostly just meringue, takes on a chewy texture. It rolled and held its shape beautifully, but it nearly resisted the serrated-edge blade of a steak knife.
Another mistake. The leaves. Again, they look very pretty in the picture...

...But I was completely unaware of the fact that these delicate leaves cannot withstand the intense heat of the oven. Upon being baked, these normally tender-enough-to-eat leaves were tough as leather, pretty much inedible.
So lessons learned from this failed culinary experiment:

1. Be sure to have enough batter when making angel food cake jelly-roll


2. DO NOT BAKE SAKURA LEAVES!! The better way to incorporate their flavor would be to either chop them up and mix it into the batter (the moisture in the batter will protect them from the dry oven heat) or wrap the cake with the leaves after it's baked.


3. ...Oh and did I mention that the leaves were VERY salty?? Yes, these leaves are salted, and were supposed to be soaked in water for a while before using to get the salt out.

OK, I guess I'll stick with the traditional recipe...introducing: Sakura Mochi

This is the Edo-style, where a ball of anko is wrapped in a crepe made of mochi, which is then wrapped in the sakura leaf. This time, I remembered to soak the leaves, and these turned out quite nice.

But...hopefully...eventually....I will develop a sakura cake in the future.