chibirisuchan (chibirisuchan) wrote in and_cupcakes, @ 2008-05-04 16:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | character: orihime, course: desserts, fandom: bleach |
Bleach: Orihime's Bean Paste & Strawberry & Other Stuff Cake
here via Laylah and *____* I loooooooove the fact that this community exists. Recipes and fandom? At the same time? I am SO all over that. ♥♥♥♥♥
Risu's notes:
I actually invented this for a friend's birthday party because she loves shiro-an (white bean paste) and I have no idea how to make bread of the correct texture for shiro-an-pan (baking is the part of cooking I never quite got, (not) aided and abetted by 10 years in an apartment with an electric stove 50 degrees off temperature and older than I am). So I went thinky for a bit and started throwing stuff together and when I got done with it, one of my Bleach-watching neighbors looked at me and said "...you know, except for bamboo, I think you actually managed to hit everything Orihime actually put into one of her food-ish things."
Given the legends of things like peanut butter and natto sandwiches, I wasn't sure if this was necessarily a compliment, but after they actually bit into it they decided it was. :) I have it on authority from six chop-licking people that this actually tastes better than it has any right to given what it sounds like... also, I made the bean paste on New Year's Eve while we were sitting around generally not doing anything else, and then we froze it until birthday-time mid February. Much easier to look shiro-an in the face again when you've had a while to forget what it's like making the stuff!
Orihime's notes:
First make a bunch of shiro-an. Or if you can find it at the store, go ahead, but my store's only got koshi-an and tsubu-an and tsubu-an really doesn't work because who ever heard of cake frosting made with azuki bean skins still in it? It wouldn't lay right, so shiro-an is better. Plus it even looks like frosting, kind of, if you aren't particular about translucency and refraction and stuff like that.
So anyway, shiro-an is what you get when you mash up boiled white beans and a bunch of sugar and run it through a sieve to make sure all the skins get out (did I mention that part about bean skins just not being good frosting material?) Yeah. Actually you should make your shiro-an before the birthday on account of you always end up with more beans than you thought and the more beans you have, the longer it takes to mash them (it took me 12 hours to get all the way through the last batch but it wasn't my fault; I used the whole bag of beans because it's such a big deal to do the soaking and the simmering and the mashing and the sugar cooking and maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal if I didn't use the whole bag of beans? Except what I really need to do is design a robot to make shiro-an for me. Robots are good at doing the same stuff over and over again. Only a robot that just made shiro-an wouldn't be much fun, so I'd teach it how to walk my cat too (my cat always wants to go outside but I don't want it to get hurt so I can't let it, but if it had a leash on, I could let it out. Only my cat really hated it the time I tried to put it on a leash, so I'd have to have a robot to walk the cat on a leash because a person who tried it would end up bleeding a lot (I kinda learned that one by experience)... er, I think I lost track of my parentheses. Where was I?
Anyway! You should start at least two days ahead on account of needing to soak your beans overnight first -- cans are a bad idea because they've got salt and stuff in them, so you want to start with honest to goodness beans. So you soak your beans, and then you cook your beans until they're really totally falling apart - like, hours and hours. Then when they're kind of losing all their structural integrity in the way that you really don't want your mecha to do, you drain the beans, and then scrub them through a fine-mesh sieve to get all the skins out. And then you weigh your white bean mash puree stuff and you measure out the same amount of sugar. And you put them both in a pan and you melt the sugar into the beans a little at a time until it's all smooth, not sugar-grainy, just smooth like butter (if the butter was cool-butter-texture but also kind of boiling like magma because that's about the texture shiro-an ends up when it's hot enough to melt the sugar).
Sooooo, once you've got the sugar and the bean paste cooked together, you let it cool down for a while on the countertop and then put it in the refrigerator with something like saran wrap right over the top to keep it from getting a skin on it (I really don't like bean skin-ish stuff on cakes, did I mention that?) And by that time it's probably at least 48 hours from when you started soaking the beans so you should probably go sleep for a while.
So then you have the birthday day! So birthdays have to have cake, it's like a law or something. But shiro-an isn't quite like frosting; it's milder, and you can't really get it to make rose shapes and stuff, and there's like a law about those too. And chocolate cake would totally swamp the flavor of the shiro-an (and after you went to all that trouble, you don't want to swamp the flavor of the shiro-an!) and white cake would be too fragile and crumbleable and wouldn't really set it off too much. So you should bake your favorite spice cake instead, in a couple of round cake pans, and while it's cooling, get a bunch of fruit.
I got strawberries and mandarins (because of Kurosaki-kun's family name patterns) only I couldn't really work citron into the cake so there could be some lemon sherbet on the side for his little sister, except I think real-vanilla-bean vanilla goes with the bean-thing better, so maybe some of both? And I got some bananas because they go with strawberries and mandarins, only they don't fit with the names. I hope Kurosaki-kun won't mind?
Anyway, you slice up all your fruit and cut your spice cake into layers, and then the fun part starts!
Here's how it goes together:
(Top part looking down)
Powdered sugar
Strawberries and mandarin oranges in a swirl pattern on the top
Top layer of spice cake, bottom-up (should probably level off the top-that-gets-flipped-down before next time just to steady it some)
Powdered sugar (because it's strawberries in February, they can usually use a little assistance)
Sliced strawberry layer
Sliced banana layer
Shiro-an layer
Next layer of spice cake
More fruit layers
Shiro-an layer
Bottom layer of spice cake, also bottom-up for flatness
(The plate goes down here)
Depending on what consistency you cooked your shiro-an to, you might be able to convince it to go around the outside of the cake for sticking more berries into, but mine ended up a little too stiff for that.
So anyway, then you cut your cake and serve it with some ice cream! So that was easy, right?