Ohayo from Tokyo!
This has got to be one of my most the most crazy things I thought I could pull off: limited space, limited resources, no electronic equipment (I did buy a set of cheap egg beaters, they literally died after 5 minutes), NO OVEN!
But world had gotten around the Tokyo office that I baked for fun and as a leisure thing (I wonder how that happened?) and so a challenge was set that I should bake a cake for our boss' birthday. I am always up for a challenge so over 3 nights in my tiny apartment where my 'kitchen' was made up of a sink, one induction burner, a bar fridge, about 50 cm x 50cm of bench space and a tiny microwave oven, I set to work.
I love their 100 yen shops - got my spatula, whisk and cake board and box there so at least some things were easy! My sister had shipped over some plain flour, Cadbury chocolate, cocoa and sugar for me - if you lived in Japan for a few months and tried to buy these items, you will quickly understand why I had them shipped over... $$$
So this was it...! Had to cake the layers individually three times due to the size of the oven. All these constraints really tested my patience :) But we got there in the end, three yummy looking, still moist layers of chocolate cake. Then came the buttercream and butter is about 4x the price in Australia and without electric beaters, I was beating for a l-o-n-g time. Again, excellent patience practice training.
Assembling the cake... another wonder how I managed with such limited space and using the butter knife that I had in the apartment, it kind of came together. I wasn't going to come up with any fancy design and again, the abundance of confectionery and snack items in Japanese shops is a wonder because it literally made the cake look beautiful - just by throwing on as much chocolate, biscuits, sugar, pocky sticks and wafers on the cake as I could and trying to get some 'height'.
Anyway, I called it a success... and it was definitely a yummy cake. But it also encouraged me not to attempt it again in my time in Japan. Thankfully, there was lots to do anyway so I was more that okay not to bake but to sight see. An experience of a lifetime in this little kitchen and I would not have changed any part of it.
