The Perfect Scone Part 2: The Solution

I suppose I've been lucky: I've found pretty decent Japanese substitutes for most of the English junk food I miss. When I want a sausage sandwich, I eat a giant gyoza or a nikuman. When I want prawn cocktail crisps I'll go for a squid wafer cracker. Toffees? Morinaga's shio-butter caramels - the chocolate version just about soothes the terrible Rolo cravings I get every now and then. 

But, try as I might, and though I did find some amazing cakes while I was trying (even the Starbucks here is good!), there was no replacement for the freshly baked English scone. I had to think of a plan.

The time I spent (or, wasted) staring into shops and dreaming of ovens

didn't change the fact that here in Tokyo they are as rare as indoor home swimming pools. So, I tried my luck with the tiny kanji-covered microwave in my tiny kitchen, that claimed it was also an oven. I was suspicious at first, but a few disasters later (easy to do if you mistake the Japanese for 'oven' for 'open', and the kanji for 'weight' for the kanji for 'time') voila! A working oven:

It took twice as long to heat up, and almost twice as long to bake anything (cue a few sunken stodgy first tries) - but that didn't stop me. Now I know that not only do they work, but you can put metal in them, and  make properly crispy roast chicken (if you are lucky enough to find bird that hasn't been chopped into bite sized chunks anywhere in Tokyo). Hooray!

Having solved the oven problem, though, the next hurdle was the flour. I never knew quite how spoilt I was to have such easy access to feather-soft self raising flour in the UK. I got some interestingly disgusting results from using tempura flour (flour mixed with salt and soda) and okonomiyaki flour (flour mixed with salt and fish flakes) by mistake. But one day, right over on the other side of the supermarket, I got all excited when I found 'cake flour'! That was, until I took a scone out of the oven that more closely resembled a bullet than a cake. So, cake flour is plain flour with added cornflour, not baking powder. Right.  I should have known that. Ok then. Plain flour, baking powder and bicarb it would have to be. My granny would have been proud. Tools below:

So, 'oven' set to 245c (not my usual fan-assisted 210), preheated for half an hour, and carrying a pile of what felt like all the white powders in the world, I was finally ready. My normal recipe had to change, but the routine was the same:

Sift flour and other random white powders (salt, sugar, baking powder, bicarb)

Add fat (normally I'd use all butter, but that makes the scones too heavy here for some reason. Best combination I found was a mixture of half super-rich cheesy 'Hokkaido butter' for flavour and half bizaarely grainy but light and almost completely flavour-free Japanese margarine)

Rub in fat (as finely as possible, the flour here gets lumpy super easily)

Add liquid (plain milk is my preference at home, but here the soda needs extra help, so using thin yoghurt and a bit of water works best for me) and mix as quickly as possible with metal knife or spoon

Cut into small chunks with scissors (the nearest I was going to get to a cookie cutter in my student fleapit) and place on baking tray charred by several previous efforts...

Shove into the oven for 18 minutes (5 minutes longer than I'd ever leave them in at home, even though I cut them half the size here)

Then, pray 'taste good, taste good!'

Result!?

The plain ones weren't exactly 'perfect':

And neither, strictly speaking, were the raisin ones:

The cranberry ones were interesting if flawed, perhaps:

And the extremely yellow pumpkin and ginger ones were improvably 'interesting':

But for me, and everyone else who has tasted them here, they worked like a dream.

Sumo and Song

To me, the best thing about this week's Grand Sumo Tournament in Ryogoku, Tokyo, wasn't the excitement of waiting for famous wrestlers to come down the passageway to the ring

or the wrestlers themselves arriving at the stage entrance outside

or the marvellous trials of strength, both physical

 

 and mental

(and that's not even mentioning the sheer sensory overload of it all)

No, it wasn't any of these. To me, the best thing was the singing. A Sumo tournament was the last place I'd have expected to find the sort of singing that transports you back to Once Upon a Time world - but that's exactly what it did. One of the referees gets up at the start of each bout and sings the bout into being, anouncing the wrestlers' names and rankings as if they were words from some religious text. For me, the singing stole the show before the main event even started (despite the background noise and the fact that it was impossible to film from my seat miles away from the ring, though of course I attempted to anyway, result below)

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised and amazed at this spectacle. The Sumo ring, with its roof and sacred inner space, is clearly modelled on Shinto shrines, and Sumo is itself perhaps even more about the ritual than the actual bouts. Later, I learned that Sumo originated as part of a religious harvest festival - that made sense. But oh, the haunting sound of the fan-carrying singer standing alone in the middle of the ring, voice ringing out across the crowd, was something else:

I might forget the wrestlers' names (actually, I already have), the rules of the game, and even where the stadium was. But what I will remember is the song.

The Perfect Scone Part 1: The Problem

I love baking (and eating) scones. So, when I came to Tokyo I was delighted that scones were everywhere! There were hundreds of varieties, from the jewelled super-scone

to the traditionally inspired (matcha flavoured)

to convenience-store seasonal varieties

home-made looking local bakery offerings

...and everything in between. Yum! I should have been in heaven. But I wasn't: instead, I felt like the country bumpkin in Aesop's The Town Mouse and Country Mouse: every single Japanese scone I tried was too rich: biscuity and cake-like and (to me) sickly. Where were the light, bread-like scones of Home? 

I dreamed about the sweet raisin variety:

The plain 'with jam and cream' variety:

Most of all, I dreamed of the heady, flour-and-sugar smell coming out of my oven on a Saturday morning. Mmm, Aah. But no...argh! Normally there wouldn't be a problem - I've baked thousands of scones in the UK, why not do the same in Tokyo? I'd already mixed up a batch in my mind - but then, the horrible truth hit me. Japanese homes don't have ovens. And, Japanese superarkets don't stock self-raising flour. So there was nowhere to put them, and nothing to make them with. The tools I had were a microwave and a bag of tempura flour, neither of which I'd ever baked with before. Eek!

So began a long journey of experiments, failures and tweaking before I finally bit into something worth the effort.

I don't usually bother with cupcakes, but if they were sausage shaped maybe I would!

Cupcake Project: Cupcakewurst: What would happen if, instead of stuffing a sausage casing with meat (or meat substitute), you stuffed it with cupcake batter?  I had to ...

Wish! Fulfilment: The Return (Part 1)

Last September I scuttled around nurseries and after school clubs all over Tokyo, telling stories in a mixture of awful Japanese, good English and a very strange brand of 'Laura-Japanglish', to kids between the ages of 2 and 7. Last month, I was delighted to be asked back to do it again.

Delighted, but nervous. Before, they'd given me 10 or 15 kids and nice short "wow, look, she's English, and she has a loud voice!" slots. This time, I had an hour to fill, and an audience of 30 or 40. My Japanese is a tiny bit better, but nowhere near good enough to hold an improvised conversation for an hour. Not without some serious cramming, anyway. Errk!

The brightly coloured objects (otherwise known as 'decoys') came out first:

...but before long, I had no choice but to start talking. With the help of a conveniently placed globe ('I am from here. We are here' etc) I introduced myself...

...and asked them to bear with me, because I'm a bit clumsy and I fall over a lot:

But when (too soon for me) that started to get old, it was time to get down to business.

Harapeko Aomushi made his first appearance since I got back to Tokyo in March. Thankfully, I can now actually read the thing in recognisable Japanese.

Then, I took a deep breath. After an excruciating moment of smiling in a rather desperate 'please stay - I really CAN speak Japanese!' way -

and a quick prayer to whichever Japanese deity happened to be listening that day...

and one or two magic spells of my own...

...out came The Three Litle Pigs - 'Sanbiki no Kobuta'. For anyone who doesn't already know the story, it's the one in which a rather angry Mother (Okaasan)

throws her three sons out of the house (or the field, depending on the version)...

where they find themselves all alone. Aw!

Before long, though, they get bored and start to think about building their own houses...

and then, they actually do it. Here, the first little pig is clearly having trouble putting the curtains up:

In the end, though, all three of them look at their new homes, pretty pleased with their first DIY efforts...

...that is, until a Big Bad Wolf, whose favourite food is fresh pork,

tiptoes upto the fields from the woods next door...
 

 ...and makes good use of his very large and powerful pair of lungs:

Two of the three houses got trashed. Lucky for the little pigs, though, the wolf hyperventilated trying to blow down the third.

When the Wolf (who, instead of getting roast pork, got his own tail roasted when he tried to climb down the third pig's chimney) was arrested for vandalism, his defence was 'well, it's their fault for being so inhospitable - I did knock!'

Dredging up my almost forgotten legal knowledge, I explained to him why that excuse wasn't going to wash:

So, the Wolf went to jail, paid his debt to society and became a Success Story. Transformed by the Prison Service, he became a vegetarian, developed an obsession with growing giant mutant peaches, and became the owner of an orchard next to a river in Old Japan...

But that's another story.

More soon!

Tezuka, T-shirts, Tokyo!

I really love musuem shops. In fact, often, the shop ends up being my favourite part of the exhibition.

Luckily that wasn't true of my visit to Setagaya's Literary Museum...

...where the exhibition of the work of manga superstar Osamu Tezuka was so interesting that not even my mind could wander very far:

 But I was even more delighted when the shop turned out to be just as good! Among other cute things, they sold delectable Astro Boy cake 'sets':

Best of all, though, they also sold me what might be the best t-shirt in the world, ever.

It looked great even in the packet

and even better out of it

Needless to say, I was delighted!

I already know that Tokyo is full of cool museums, and exhibitions, and cakes. But now that I've discovered that Tokyo is also full of amazing t-shirts, I feel a potentially dangerous new habit emerging.

Tee hee!

Cake Firsts!

I thought cake-only vending machines in Tokyo were like some sort of holy grail - everyone's heard of them, but no-one's actually seen one. But, at Waseda Station yesterday afternoon, all that changed.

My sheer delight even trumped the moment when, in a cafe on Wednesday night, this rather beautiful orange souffle dressed as a mini battleship, appeared before me and said, 'hi':

Perhaps it's just as well that I ate it before I finished my second glass of bubbly and got tempted to say 'hi' back. No-one ran away. And the two new friends I went out with are still speaking to me.

Phew!