The Sugar Bar

Japanese sweets and pastries (traditional, modern, Chinese and/or French-influenced) have a very soft spot in my heart and a welcome place in my belly because they are so known for being light, delicate, subtle, understated and adorable in every sense of the word. It’s like a fluffy teddy bear or a frou frou lace skirt or a pastel-coloured cone of cotton candy. And where do I normally go to for such indulgences? Sun Moulin Japanese bakery. I love this place and my whole family’s a big fan and loyal frequenter.

But after returning home and finally being able to suss out the good, new, and sometimes modern eats available on our sunny island, I’ve discovered more Japanese pâtisseries and am so pleased to see them around and about! Ladyironchef, a local blogger with a notorious sweet-tooth, introduced me to Pâtisserie Glacé. There’s no turning back now. The melting of soft, cloud-light choux cream, the fluffiness and airiness of chiffon and the use of simple lush ingredients like strawberries, mangoes and paper-thin crepes (yes I’ve researched their menu). I’ll be going back to Glacé for a lot more.

Things we tasted? A Mont Blanc モンブラン comprising a gorgeous chestnut cream or paste if you rather with lovely thin noodle-like strands sat atop a cotton-soft chiffon platform. Could not resemble the Swiss Alps in any way (this baby was about the size of my palm!) but very beautiful and memorable. I won’t forget the pillowy softness of the chiffon and that velvety smooth chestnut cream which was garnished with tiny bits of roasted chestnuts!

…and the Chiffon Cup was another interesting thing we licked up. A tofu chiffon served in a paper cup with fresh cream and puff pastry. I am digging the fact that this chiffon’s main ingredient is TOFU which I adore completely and tend to eat raw and cold during the summer. This was delicious and has only piqued my appetite for Glacé’s organic green tea tofu chiffon cake. A return trip is much needed.

AH, a post that’s meant to be short and sweet, just like Glacé is. A humble hole-in-the-wall type of pâtisserie in the Icon Village but with much to offer in terms of little gâteux; no seats or standing bars in sight save an amiable agreement with a kopi (coffee) shop around the corner for hungry diners to tuck into their cakes seated. Simple, short and sweet. That’s all there is to it. Oh, and so heavenly light and more-ish.

Pâtisserie Glacé, ダイスキ!

Pâtisserie Glacé by Chef Yamashita
12 Gopeng Street
#01-33/34 Icon Village
Singapore 078877

http://cakeglace.com

In Asia, we have a love affair for things chewy, stretchy, glutinous or as the Taiwanese describe it, QQ. Not surprisingly, Su-yin and I take much delight in things mochi so when she shared me some homemade mochi cakes (recipe here), I was hooked. And after patiently waiting for her recipe to be blogged, I decided it was imperative that I try my hand at making these QQ little treats too to satisfy my recurring cravings and the incessant need to gnaw. And because some things just come as BUY 1 GET 1 FREE, this recipe is flexible and allows you free reign to be fairly creative with your choice of ingredients.

It recently came to my attention that there was a Kansho Matsuri in Japan, translation: a Sweet Potato Festival; what goes on there I do not know so enlighten me if you do. Nonetheless, I think we can all agree that the Japanese are cute and meticulous with their food, and how dedicated they are to such a humble ingredient! My pessimistic soulmate Y (now sharing a dirty flat with his younger bro in Tokyo and hating it) will correct me, say I’m being ridiculous and declare all Japanese people mad. I wonder why we get along so well like maple syrup and pancakes. Call it coincidence, fate or whatevs, we are going through a similar sweet potato phase in my house and the little voice in my head was suggesting we go in the direction of baked sweet potatoes. But that on its own, although delicious with honey and coconut milk, is a tad boring and might not hold your attention for long.

I’ve used Japanese sweet potatoes here, purple-skinned and of the yellow flesh which has a lovely sweet, buttery and chestnut-like flavour. I thought this might be better for a mochi-based cake since the regular Western sweet potato (orange-fleshed) tends to be a lot wetter/watery and sometimes less sweet. And you know me, after the colour green (hence the matcha), I’m drawn to purple like a kiwi bird is to shiny things so purple-skinned spuds for the win!

A very basic and popular way of eating sweet potatoes is to steam them after washing, leave to cool a little and then break them in half to share and eat with friends and family. Some other ways it is served is to have it steamed, skinned, soaked in syrup and coconut milk – another type of sweet yam, the tapioca, is served this way in my country and is so delicious and fragrant you almost feel drugged on a couple of mouthfuls; or cooked in sweet soups, savoury soups, desserts, etc. The variations are countless. A favourite bakery of mine also makes these very light and delicate steamed white cakes – it’s like eating a cloud for goodness sake – and it has little bits of steamed sweet potatoes in it. You can say that’s probably what inspired these cakes.

We all know the health properties of matcha already, that it is vit C-packed and so forth so I won’t bother to expound on that. But of course, FYI, when subjected to high heat like when baking or scalded by boiling water, matcha loses all of its amazing properties. Therefore, a word of advice is to use regular cooking grade matcha for baked goods and save the real ceremony-grade stuff for drinking. With regards to sweet potatoes, you’ll be pleased to know that they are pretty resilient babies. They aren’t just vitamin-packed and easy to cook or scrummy in anything. Sweet potatoes are rich in dietary fibre and because they contain loads of anthocyanoside, is good for bringing down high blood pressure, effects of constipation and is apparently great for the skin (not surprised, its vit C eh!). Plus, they are cheap and great at staving off hunger.

So maybe what I’m trying to say here is that my main ingredients aren’t too naughty? Does that make my mochi cakes less sinful? You decide.

So how did these turn out?

Because the steamed sweet potatoes added a bit more moisture to the cake, I had to bake them a little bit longer. I was half tempted to let these cakes dry out more in the oven, seeing as I’m not used to baking with mochiko (rather than boiling/steaming/grilling) it. These cakes upon pulling apart looked like muffins, with a similar consistency and lovely fluffiness but it is thoroughly deceiving because the cake is stretchy, chewy and almost glistens with its glutinous content. Delicious, moist and very different to the regular cupcake/muffin (might take some getting used to for mochi virgins). That chewy bite, soft but with a little resistance, is also satisfying and slightly more-ish. The taste was pretty good and that surely is the work of evaporated milk but one thing I would never ever use again, and all of it going down the drain right now, is vanilla essence! I hate that stuff and do not know why there are still bottles of that stuff in my house.

The smell of it reeks and I might have used a tad too much for these cakes in my desperation for a teaspoon of vanilla. Mistake.

Vanilla essence fail. Ignore that, and these QQ mochi cakes are still rocking it.

Matcha & Sweet Potato Mochi Cakes
(Recipe adapted from Lemonpi, inspired by Suyin from BreadetButter)
Ingredients

225g mochiko (mochi flour)
85g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
about 1 1/2 cup of steamed kansho (Japanese sweet potatoes), cut into small pieces
175g caster sugar
187g evaporated/Carnation milk
2 eggs, at room temperature
3 tsp matcha
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract

Wash and gently scrub the sweet potatoes being careful not to scrub off its precious skin. If your potatoes are fairly large and bulbous, you might want to pierce a few holes on it with a fork before steaming. Bring some water to boil in a steamer. Steam potatoes until they are just cooked through and not too mushy. Let cool on a place and set aside for later. When it is cool to handle, cut them up into small cubes or pieces.

Preheat the oven to 175d Celsius. Grease a 12 cup muffin pan or line with muffin papers.

Sift the mochiko, baking powder and matcha together in a bowl.
In another bowl, whisk the sugar and eggs together with an electric mixer on high speed until light and fluffy.

Fold in melted butter, then the evaporated milk and vanilla. Fold in the flour mixture and the sweet potato pieces until just incorporated.

Pour cake mixture into muffin tin, filling it up to 3/4 full. Place in oven to bake for 20-25 mins. I found my muffins a little wet and baked it for another 5 mins. Cool on rack completely then store in an airtight container.

After the red velvet, kuromame (black sesame), matcha and kinako, my one other love is sweet potato! Particularly, the elusive and rather expensive purple-fleshed variety. Many regard the sweet potato as a wholesome and vitamin-stuffed carbohydrate, a lovely alternative to the regular spud in bangers and mash or a flexible ingredient used in both savoury and sweet dishes or snacks. For us, me & my family & Singaporeans in particular, sweet potatoes are a very humbling edible root. And they are symbolic of the Japanese Occupation during WWII.

Sweet potatoes were (and for some, still are) a common root vegetable grown in back gardens, etc. A hardy root, sweet potatoes can grow in many types of soil and rarely need pesticides. It is commonly known to us as belonging to that category known as ‘poor man’s food’. But like all poor man’s food, they are not only cheap and easy to grow and cook but delicious as well. They lose very little of its beneficial elements after cooking too. Both the root and its leaves can be eaten. Sweet potato leaves fried in belachan is a common Malaysian, Singaporean nyona dish that’s fragrant and quite gorgeous.

During the Japanese Occupation when rice was scarce and rationing was implemented so as to feed starving families, people were encouraged or forced to use whatever land they had to grow tapiocas, yams and sweet potatoes. However, sweet potatoes were the most commonly grown and the one root that is to today still almost immediately associated with WWII. As my gramma says, it was a sweet potato for breakfast lunch and dinner every day of the week and sometimes there wasn’t even enough to go round. There were even some people whose legs swelled up and became too painful to walk from such an imbalanced diet and malnutrition. Today, although sweet potatoes form the basis of many delicious treats, desserts and savoury dishes, when cooked in the most simple way – washed and scrubbed, then steamed and broken into 2 to share amongst family members – they are symbolic of the pain and suffering our ancestors (living or dead) had to go through during the Japanese Occupation.

On a lighter note, a favourite Chinese dessert of mine is the sweet potato ginger sweet soup. My maternal gramma once cooked it for me after a day at kindergarten but instead of using the local orange-fleshed sweet potato which can be found at all markets and bought for cheap, she’d used a purple-fleshed sweet potato that on cooking had dyed the soup a light pinkish purple. As I remember it today, it was a REAL treat! How different that soup was and although it didn’t exactly taste vastly different, its vibrant colour certainly gave it a special twinkle. Somehow, as the years have passed and I’ve grown up, finding these purple-fleshed potatoes are like searching for a needle in a haystack. My father, who used to have a little farm patch of his own and had started growing vegetables and sweet potatoes as a young boy of 12, reminisced of his days of attempting to grow the perfect purple potatoes.

Unfortunately, these purple potatoes are ridiculously hard to find here in Singapore. Instead, Australian orange-fleshed ones and the yellow-fleshed purple skin Japanese sweet spuds are increasingly popular in local markets. The purple-fleshed spud is nowhere in sight, not even a trace! Nevertheless, these purple spuds which are known as murasaki imo in Japanese are also hard to find even in Japan, being only available at certain times of the year in select supermarkets. Over the weekend, we were lucky to stumble upon these at Isetan which bring these in only once a year. They timed it well I suppose, since it coincided with their Okinawan food fair.

You can imagine my happiness…to have found my purple Queen once again.

Beni Imo Dango (Deep-Fried Sweet Potato Dango)

Sakura Daifuku with Anko Filling from Sun Moulin bakery

And with these treats we took home, I proudly declared it tea time!

Now, to fully and very completely satisfy my purple imo cravings, I need to go find me this! Pocky…oh, it shall take me back to my childhood and high school days – chomping down on stick after stick during a boring lecture. Bliss. Next on my agenda: find a way to plant these beautiful spuds in my own garden. With our ridiculously hot weather, fertile soil and green-fingered parents, we might be able to successfully harvest my purple Queens.