Sometimes recipes don't work (on my hand).

making kasutera

I always like to try new recipes, especially dessert recipes. Most of the time the outcome is great, and I am more than happy to share them. However sometimes the taste is just not that impressive. It could be that the recipe itself is bad, change of some ingredients makes it bad, or the person who is cooking it (that's me) is bad.

I tried 2 recipes that turned out to be not so good. One was kasutera (カステラ, a kind of Japanese sponge cake). I got this recipe from a dessert cookbook I recently bought in Tokyo. Basically it's just eggs, sugar, honey and flour, and it's very simple to make. What surprised me a bit was that it called for 100g flour, which to me was too much (we only needed 3 eggs in this recipe). The result was just as what I expected. The taste was good. It has very delicate honey flavor, but the texture was awful. The cake was chewy because of the flour.


berry strata

The other was berry strata from Giada's show, Everyday Italian. She is one of my favorite chefs and her dishes are always big hits on the table. However, this time was not the case. A strata is kinda like a bread pudding. It's also very easy to make. I happened to have most of the ingredients on hand and I really wanted to use the frozen berries that had been in my freezer for a while. The only thing I needed to get was ricotta cheese. So as soon as I saw this episode, I decided to make it. The strata baked beautifully, but it was the ricotta cheese that ruined the flavor (I think). The ricotta cheese didn't really blend in the whole eggy fruity flavor. Instead it tasted a little like some sweet lasagna (ricotta cheese is the major ingredient in lasagna). It's still sitting in my fridge now. I probably won't finish it.