A New Chapter

On December 7th, 2006, I was handed my certificate of completion, diploma and a silver medal. My stint in Tokyo to finish the final level of the patisserie course at Le Cordon Bleu is officially over. In the course of two and half months I ate numerous cakes in the name of field study; bought too many cookbooks for research purposes; and force fed friends who are too nice to say no way too many versions of test cakes. What I thought was going to be two and half months of fun and carefree living turned out just to be that, thanks to the friendship and support of all my friends in Tokyo and my very supportive and understanding husband whom I left behind alone in Hong Kong.

Now that I have closed that chapter in my life, it’s time to move on, and move to Singapore. I flew back to Hong Kong the day after my final exam at Le Cordon Bleu to pack up the house. Libby left to go to Singapore three days ago on her own and we will leave in just four days. I am a little reluctant to say goodbye to Hong Kong, a city which I didn’t really get a chance to know better. I also feel sad to leave the new friends that I’ve made in my short stay in Hong Kong, but I am sure our paths will cross again some time in the future. At the same time, I am excited to move into our new home in Singapore and becoming LynnInSG. Until then, this is my last post as LynnInHK.

Just my luck

“I should go to the morning practical session even though we’re only making jam and jelly candy today.”

“I’m so tired I just want to go home and sleep.”

“Ok, if I can make the 8am bus I’ll go to class. If I miss it, I’ll take the Narita express and go home.”

“But even if I go home I’ll only get two hours of sleep before I have to get up again and go to the afternoon lecture.”

These thoughts drifted in and out of my half-awake consciousness the entire six hours of red-eye flight from Singapore to Tokyo. In the end I barely convinced myself to go to class, mostly because I thought it was more trouble than it’s worth to go home for the morning.

When I got to school, with 25 minutes to spare, however, I was told that there would be no school today because there’s no electricity. We were asked to write down our phone number so the school could contact us later to let us know whether there’ll be school tomorrow. Nobody knew why the electricity went out because all the other buildings in the area had electricity.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Out of all the days, it had to be today, when I had to drag both my sleepwalking self and my luggage from the airport to school! To think that I could’ve saved myself the trouble had I decided not to come in! I knew I shouldn’t have been so diligent…

Macaron, Macaron, Macaron!!

The original plan for Saturday was to go to Mt. Takao to take photos of the autumn leaves and then have dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, Ukai Toriyama, with my roommate Tanya. Of course the weather wasn’t cooperating and started to rain before we even got up. Looking at the gloomy and dreary weather, Tanya and I decided to stay in and have a lazy day instead. I was finishing up my cake and thought of trying to decorate it with macarons.

I was naturally a little nervous because it took me five tries to work out the gas oven in my Tokyo apartment the last time I made macarons at home. I never tried making them in my electric oven (yup, I brought my own oven to Tanya’s house…) so I wasn’t sure how many tries it’d take for them to turn out right. With the rain and higher humidity, I almost gave up before I even started. Then again, what else was I going to do besides watching LOST? Out came the frozen egg whites, almond powder and silpats. Instead of dissolving the colorants in water I mixed the color powder with the granule sugar but didn’t know exactly how much to use. That’s why the macarons are ten shades brighter than I wanted them to be, but the shapes all turned out perfect on the second try! I could hardly believe my luck.

I tried putting them around the cake but because of the bright colors, it didn’t look right, so I put some chocolate ganache in between and had them with Tanya over a cup of hot tea. What a perfect rainy Saturday.

Just can’t stop

Before Sunday my entire thoughts were occupied with how to improve my cake recipe, but when it’s finalized at last there’s suddenly nothing to do. Jason’s leaving also left an empty feeling, even though I knew I’d see him again in less two weeks in Singapore. So when I got home after seeing him off in Tokyo station, I felt like I had to do something to occupy myself, like cooking something, anything.

The only thing in the fridge that can be used conceivably for dessert is a carton of almost expired milk. Not even an egg left after the weekend cake project. What could I make with just milk? Then it hit me. Rice! Every household in Japan has rice! So rice pudding is the natural thing to do. I also remembered the yummy fig mousse cake Jason and I had over the weekend and I happened to have bought some dried figs and was getting a little tired of eating them as is. I think the cake we had was made with port-poached figs, but my roommate has two bottles of un-finished red wine sitting there waiting to get spoiled. Red wine plus sugar equals port, right? Well, sort of, anyway, so I used that.

The end result is a creamy rice pudding topped with red wine poached figs.


Rice pudding:
500ml full-fat milk
¼ rice
sugar to taste
nutmeg, cinnamon to taste

- bring milk to a boil and add rice and all the other ingredients
- keep on simmering and stirring until rice is soft
- stop cooking when it’s still a little runny (will thicken)
- store in fridge overnight

Red wine poached figs:
Dry figs
Red wine
Sugar

- place dry figs into saucepan until bottom is ¾ covered (leave space for figs to expand)
- Pour enough wine over fig to cover
- Add sugar
- Bring to a boil and then turn down heat to simmer
- Make a paper lid with parchment paper and place directly on figs
- Keep on simmering, adding more wine as needed so it doesn’t dry out, until figs are soft

It's decided

I finally have a cake recipe. After giving the first four prototypes to virtually everyone I know in Tokyo and getting plenty of feedbacks, I completely revamped the recipe(a big thank you to Pei-ran and Yoko who gave really honest and constructive criticisms). The complaints people had for the first four versions are mostly about the grapefruit. The taste was too subtle, so unless told, most people couldn’t tell it’s in it. There was also a disconnect between the white color of the mousse and the image of grapefruit. So in the final recipe, I added paste made of grapefruit peel, got rid of the meringue and used egg yolks to further enhance the yellow color. I also increased the amount of champagne in the gelee layer to the same amount as grapefruit juice. I'm such an alcoholic when it comes to alcohol in cakes, so the more the merrier.

The end result is this. It’s 16cm instead of 18cm so I still need to make a full-sized one.



I also need to think of what to put on the cake as decoration. This cake was made over the weekend when Jason decided to surprise me by coming to Tokyo for a visit. As a result it was made in stages, mostly in the morning before we went out and at night after we came back. During the rush of things, I made a calculation error and ended up short on the strawberry/raspberry mousse. In an desperate effort to salvage the cake before the mousse starts to set, I forgot to sprinkle grapefruit peel on the cake surface. The decorations were thrown on the cake ten minutes before Jason was due to leave for the airport so he could take a look/taste and give me his honest opinion. Since he’s usually my toughest critic, I was glad that he liked both the taste and the texture of the cake. I am still not entirely happy with the white chocolate/feuilletine mixture I spread on the cake base to provide texture contrast. It wasn’t too hard to eat but it could be hard to cut through with a fork. That’s one thing I still need to work on, but it’s such a relief to come to an end of this cake saga, although I did have fun and learned a lot in the process.

Stay tuned for the final version (if there ever is one).

The Final Exam

As you all know, the reason why I left Jason and Libby in Hong Kong in the care of a 26 year old nanny to come to Tokyo for three months right in the middle of yet another international house moving is to get my French patisserie diploma from Le Cordon Bleu. Seeing that it’s the one and only goal, it goes without saying that I aim to achieve it.

The final exam for the patisserie supreme course at LCB Japan differs from other LCB schools in that we have to come up with an original recipe and make it on the final day in 2.5 hours. (The final exam at the Paris school is sugar works) Before I even started school, friends from my previous LCB class warned me that it’s never too early to start thinking about what I’m going to make. So I started thinking while I was in HK and decided that I should do something with yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit that has a unique fragrance and fresh flavor), only to come back to school and find a list of ingredients that we can use for the cake that, surprise, surprise!, does not include Yuzu. My second favorite ingredient, macha (Japanese green tea) is also not on the list. No time to waste, have to come up with another plan.

After weeks of eating more cakes than any human should legally allowed to do, and seeing dancing cakes whenever I close my eyes, I’ve finally narrowed it down to two choices:



1. A fromage blanc mousse cake with a layer of raspberry gelee and a layer of chocolate mousse in the middle, on a pistachio dacquoise cake base. The cake will be sprayed with white chocolate in a pistolet to give it a fuzzy texture. I’ll make pink macarons with green pistachios sprinkled on top and stick them around the cake and place a couple of white and dark chocolate curls on top along with some raspberries and pistachio nuts.

2. A strawberry/raspberry mousse cake with a layer of grapefruit mousse in the middle, on a chocolate biscuit cake base with maybe a thin layer of feuilletine flakes as a texture contrast. The bottom part of the cake will be coated with craquelin a la framboise (chopped almond mixed with raspberry puree and baked to dry at low temp). The cake top will be pink with threads of grapefruit peels showing through and will be decorated with strawberry, raspberry and dark chocolate curls.

The first idea came about because I fell in love with fromage blanc from the first bite, and one of my all time favorite cakes made at LCB is a fromage blanc raspberry creation called Schuss. Because there’ll be many test runs, it’s so very important to choose something you would want to eat, over and over again without getting sick of it, and who can get tired of fromage blanc and raspberry? The only problem is that the combo has been done so many times that it’s hard to come up with something new, which is why I’ve decided to add the pistachio and chocolate component. Only now, it’s gotten so complicated that I don’t know whether I’ll be able to finish it in time.

The second idea is a direct result of the visit to Idemi. After the fruit-gasm experience I couldn’t stop thinking about different ways to combine fruits. Initially I was going to do strawberry/raspberry with a lemon filling, then one day I drank some freshly squeezed grapefruit juice that my roommate Tanya made for breakfast and thought, hey, why not grapefruit! It’s less acidic than lemon so there’s no need to add too much sugar, but more importantly, a grapefruit is much bigger so I can get the same amount of juice of four lemons from just one grapefruit, which means precious squeezing time saved!

Now that I have the ideas, the next step is to start making them, one component at a time. First on the list, fromage blanc mousse. (TBC)

Inspired by Fruits

Dear Mr. Hidemi Sugino,

You don’t know me, but you probably remember the strange group of five women who went to your Kyobashi shop Idemi and ordered thirteen cakes, spent more than two hours passing the plates around taking turns tasting each cake, and each bought a copy of your autographed recipe book the other day. Well, I was one of them.



The first time I heard about you was from Keiko’s blog. She said she’d never been to your shop so I said I’d go try it for her. That was almost two years ago. I did make it to your shop once, but it was late in the afternoon and you had sold out all your cakes and closed up. Since then, I’ve learned that even though it’s not possible for you to make every cake from start to finish, you want to make sure each one was touched by you personally. This limits the number of cakes produced so they are sold out around noon everyday. To be very honest, I wasn’t entirely convinced that anyone’s cake could be that good that it’s worth going at shop opening to try. I thought you were just another hyped up “celebrity chef.”

It took four of my classmates from Le Cordon Bleu to give me the initiative to get up early and line up before 10am to wait for your shop to open. I was somewhat surprised that a staff came out a few minutes before opening to explain that most of the freshly made cakes are not to be bought back and must be consumed in the shop, because they are so delicate that they’re sure to melt or lose shape en route. Right there I thought, “Wow, this is someone who really takes pride in what he does.”

I have seen photos of your creations in magazines and books, but to behold them with my own eyes was a whole different experience. I had thought Pierre Hermes was a genius in presentation, but you are something entirely different. If PH was bold and daring, you are delicate and subtle. From color coordination to attention to details, you are a master of the masters. Then when I actually tried the cakes, each one tastes familiar yet so different from anything I’ve ever had. Take your signature cake Ambroisie, for example, chocolate and pistachio. Who hasn’t had a chocolate and pistachio cake? Yet somehow, your pistachio cream is the smoothest of them all and the chocolate mousse is so fluffy and light it melted away in my mouth almost instantly with just enough after taste lingering on the tongue, wanting more.

You are also a genius when it comes to innovative combination of flavors. My second favorite, after Ambroisie was a guava/honeydew melon mousse. The naturally delicate flavor of guava blends with the distinct aroma of honeydew melon, creating such a refreshing taste that I thought I was eating watermelon on a hot summer day.

My only complaint is that you don’t allow photography in your store. With my hopelessly short-term memory, I can only remember a fraction of the thirteen cakes we tried. To prevent me from forgetting further, I’m going to write it down, in no particular order:

Miss Albion, a wonderful looking hexagonal creation of mint and chocolate mousse with thin butterfly-like chocolate wings on top.

Charme, a variation on the Foret Noire with chocolate au lait and chocolate flavored cream chantilly sandwiched in biscuit chocolat.

Paradis, a white wine and gooseberry mousse cake so pretty that I really had trouble taking the first bite.

Mariee, a strawberry and pistachio mousse cake that had the most beautiful pastel shade.

Exotique, a mango filled banana mousse dusted with fine coconut flakes.

La Harmonie, a cherry and lemon mousse combo that tasted so heavenly I couldn’t stop eating it. I never knew lemon and cherry could work so well together.

Larme, a chestnut mousse, chestnut cream concoction coated in coco powder. Enough said.

A mango layer cake that I couldn’t remember the name. Having had so many different types of mango dessert in Hong Kong, I must admit that I wasn’t extremely impressed with this one, but my classmates all said it was very good, so it must’ve been just me.

I know I’ve missed a few, but every one of the thirteen cakes we tried was so good that one tends to only remember the very best. I must admit that I’m not the easily-impressed type when it comes to food and drinks, but I was truly wowed by you, Mr. Sugino. I think this is beyond a doubt what you’re meant to do and you do it with such grace and sophistication. I cannot tell you how much I was inspired by you, and how humbled I was at the same time. Because of you, I am looking at fruits and mousse in a whole new way. For my final presentation at Le Cordon Bleu, I have decided to make a fruity mousse cake. I am under no delusion that it would be anything close to your ingenuity, but I only hope that it would reflect your spirit and philosophy that the cake should bring out the best of what the materials have to offer and make the materials come to life.

So I would just like to thank you not only for giving me the inspiration for my final project but for teaching me a lesson of dedication and the need to constantly improve myself.

Sincerely yours,

Lynn Chen

Moving, yet again

To make a long story short, five months after moving to Hong Kong, less than four months in our apartment, and two months after getting our brand new furniture that are custom made to fit our apartment, we are being transferred to Singapore. To be fair, the choice was partly ours because I never really managed to like living in Hong Kong, and on a recent trip back to Singapore I realized how much cleaner and orderly it is over there and how much I had missed the food. So when we were offered the chance to move back, we jumped at it.

Don’t get me wrong, Hong Kong has its good points: the best dim sum I’ve ever had; the best sales; my huge kitchen with the double fridge; the numerous hiking trails nearby; and the fantastic view on a clear day… But then again there’s the stress of having to deal with substandard quality of service on a daily basis; the crowd every time I go to Central to run errands; the language barrier; and the constant feeling of being ripped off because you’re an outsider and don’t speak the language.

So we’re moving, back to Singapore where Jason lived for more than four years when he first started working and I for less than three years. The only complication is that I’ll be in Tokyo for almost three months to finish the advanced level of Le Cordon Bleu’s pastry course and our move will happen while I’m in Tokyo. The packing won’t be too bad because the movers will take care of everything, but Libby has to be in quarantine for one month in Singapore and I won’t be there to visit her everyday. My poor baby!