Japanese-Style Fruit and Cream Cake

This was my project for today :) I got a food scale so I am able to measure ingredients by weight. I baked the cake, Elise spread the cream, I prepped the fruit, and Shelley did most of the fruit arranging.

This is cake as I think it should be :) Just a hint of sweetness, creaminess from the whipped cream, and lots of fruit. As far as cakes go, this is probably about as healthy as it can get. It’s not loaded down with fat and sugar, at least not in comparison to the Western decorated cakes.

Here is the recipe for the cake portion, found on the happysweet.com site, translated into English. I kept the measurements in metric except for the oven temperature.

Japanese-Style Sponge Cake

Ingredients (for 1 layer)

• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 45g sugar
• 40g cake flour
• 20g cornstarch
• 15g unsalted butter, melted

Instructions

1. Sift the flour and cornstarch together and set aside. Preheat oven to 355F. Prepare 8 or 9-inch round cake pan by spraying pan with nonstick spray, lining bottom with parchment paper, and spraying nonstick spray on the paper.
2. Crack eggs into large mixing bowl. Using hand mixer, pulse to break apart yolk and roughly mix together. While continuing to pulse, slowly pour in sugar and mix.
3. Turn mixer to high and beat egg and sugar mixture together until it is nearly white and fluffy, about (I’m guessing here because I didn’t time it) 7-10 minutes. The mixture should be fairly stiff to to where you can draw a figure-eight with the batter and it will remain on the surface for several seconds.
4. Sift the sifted flour/cornstarch into the whipped eggs. Using a rubber spatula, carefully fold the flour into the eggs. Use a slicing motion to fold while slowly rotating the bowl.
5. Once the flour has been folded and batter no longer has a powdery appearance, add the melted butter and fold by gently scooping from the bottom.
6. Pour batter into prepared cake pan. From about a height of 2-inches, drop the pan onto a hard surface. This helps remove any large air bubbles in the batter.
7. Place pan in preheated oven and bake for about 15 minutes until surface is golden brown (Japanese: color of a fox) and tester comes out clean.
8. Immediately remove cake from pan and cool completely on a wire rack.