Let's Baking!

Confoundingly for a blog with betsu bara in the title, there is nary a dessert entry to be found. Let's change that.

First though, I want to brag about the microwave. The microwave not only changes to an oven at the touch of a button, it gets use almost daily as our toaster. Just turn the nob to #12, which is the toast setting and then with another twist, input the number of slices you wish to have toasted. Yeah, you have to manually flip the bread over if you want both sides golden brown, but it seems like a small price to pay. There is a drink button and a magical "warming" button that with one push heats whatever you have placed inside to a steamy 70 degrees Celsius! Japanese technology can be truly wonderful.

But what about Japanese desserts? Not too shabby, especially if you like sweetened azuki bean paste and matcha. I like both just fine, but don't really ever crave either after a meal. Usually I am a chocolate or don't even bother kind of girl, but neither of the following have any chocolate in them. Instead they are autumn inspired, SWEET PUMPKIN COOKIES from Muji, and GINGER PEAR TARTS which I concocted with a nashi that was way too mushy to eat.

The pumpkin cookies came from a box of mix I bought at Muji. They looked so cute on the box I couldn't resist. They turned out to be one of the more challenging mixes I have ever put together (Betty Crocker and I go way back too!) The dough was really sticky and not so conducive to rolling into pumpkin shapes, but Keizo did the best he could. Then brushing them with egg whites and not getting the egg white all over the baking sheet was another challenge. I ended up with a bunch of nice crusted on egg whites at the end. Lovely. The cookies were good, very dense, and cute to look at, even if they were a bit lumpy.

If you have read this far, there should be no doubt in your mind that Keizo and I love food. Our fridge is quite full at the moment, although not quite as full as it was right after our trip to Costco and upon the receipt of the generous farm box from his parents. Sometimes though we have more than even we can handle. Such was the case with a nashi (Asian pear) that was left over from shopping more than a week ago. It got a little lost in the shuffle and by the time I got it out to slice up for breakfast on Tuesday, it was pretty mealy. Not wanting to waste it (fruit in Japan is not cheap!) I thought it would be perfect to add to some kind of pastry crust. With Keizo at work and it pouring rain outside, I wanted to make do with what I had on hand. So I found a recipe for "Kart Wheels" (jam tarts) in my Gold Medal Flour Alpha-Bakery Children's Cookbook(copyright 1987!) and looked at allrecipes.com for some kind of pear pie filling. Since I only had one mushy pear, cutting the recipe down to size was a bit of challenge, so I used it as more of a guide. And while the end result was awfully pale, they won high praises from Keizo and were utterly delicious hot with vanilla ice cream.