Yuzu and Green Tea Madeira Cake

The Formula 1 Foods challenge, over at Caroline Makes, invites us to produce something that is either typical of the cuisine of the country where the latest round of the F1 GP is taking place, or is inspired by some aspect of life in that country. Baking for the Japanese race, held last weekend, proved quite difficult as bread, cakes and desserts do not play a large part in traditional Japanese cuisine.

However, Western foods are making a growing impression on the Japanese. They both adapt products to their own tastes - witness green tea or cherry blossom flavoured KitKats - and embrace a concept whole-heartedly and excel at producing it themselves. The range of bread and pastries available in department store food halls and specialist shops, ranging from baguettes, through almond croissants to tartes aux fruit and chocolate gateaux is some of the best I've seen (and tasted) outside France.

As I couldn't bake something Japanese, I decided to reverse the concept again, and bring popular Japanese flavours into something quintessentially British - the Madeira cake! I followed the traditional Madeira recipe - 175g each of butter and caster sugar, 3 eggs and 250g SR flour - and added 3 tablespoons of yuzu juice. Then I removed about 1/3 of the batter and stirred in 2 teaspoons matcha (green tea powder), to give a quite vividly coloured batter.

The two batters were layered into a 2lb loaf tin, starting and ending with the plain coloured batter, The cake was baked at 170C for 55 minutes, or until a test probe came out clean.
After the cake was cool, I made a thick glacé icing with icing sugar and 1 tablespoon yuzu juice, and drizzled it over the cake.

I made a few miscalculations about how much batter to use when building up the layers and ended up with a large green layer near the top of the cake, I also expected the two colours of batter to swirl naturally as the cake baked to make a classic marble cake, but this didn't happen, so the cut cake looks a little strange. All I needed to do was run a chopstick through the batter to swirl it myself - I'll know better next time!

The flavour of the cake was quite delicate, as befits a Madeira cake, which is usually only flavoured with a hint of lemon, and the slight bitterness of the green tea was a good contrast to the sweetness of the rest of the cake, especially the icing, where the flavour of yuzu was much stronger.

Coconut and Yuzu Cake

This is a very simple cake, with only two ingredients for flavour, but sometimes that's all we need. It can get tiresome trying to decide if we can identify every different flavour element suggested by the name of a dish, not to mention other ingredients added to enhance a dish, but not mentioned by name.

This cake was made to use up about 20mls of Yuzu juice leftover after making the frosting for this Green Tea Cake; it was just enough to give a subtle citrus flavour to the cake without dominating the coconut. The beauty of Yuzu is that although it is obviously a citrus flavour, it's not easy to define any more accurately than that - it's lemony, but not as sour, is perhaps the nearest description. A sweet grapefruit might be nearer the mark, although grapefruit isn't a strong flavour and I've never used it in baking. However you describe it, it hit the right note here, adding just enough of a zing to lift the cake from just being a coconut cake.

I went back to a basic cake recipe I've been using for almost 40 years. It makes a plain cake which is denser than a sponge cake and is a good carrier for either just added flavours or solid ingredients such as dried fruit or chopped chocolate. As the fat is rubbed into the flour, it is quick to make too - from weighing the ingredients to getting the cake into the oven is only a matter of a few minutes.

Rub 150g butter (at room temperature) into 250g SR flour, then mix in 150g caster sugar and 80g desiccated coconut. Make a well in the centre of the ingredients and add 3 eggs and 20mls yuzu juice;  mix well, adding enough milk to give a soft dropping consistency. Transfer to a 7"(18cm) diameter round tin or a 2lb loaf tin, level the top, and bake at 180C for around 75 minutes, until a test probe comes out clean.

I left the cake undecorated, but a drizzle of glacé icing and a few shreds of toasted coconut strips would be good for a smarter occasion.

Green Tea Layer Cake with Yuzu Frosting

I'm trying very hard to bake small things at the moment, as there's only the two of us here now, and it wouldn't hurt either of us to eat a bit (or a lot, in my case!) less. One problem with small cakes, rather than individual cupcakes, or sliced traybakes, is to get them to look right, proportionally; I don't think I've succeeded very well with this cake - narrower and taller might have looked better.

I chose yuzu as the flavour for the frosting on this cake with this month's AlphaBakes challenge in mind; once that was decided it seemed a logical progression to add some matcha (green tea) powder to the cake batter and give the whole thing a Japanese feel. Yuzu is an Asian citrus fruit with a unique flavour - described as grapefruit crossed with mandarin - and it's juice is found for sale in this country in very small bottles (60mls), usually in the 'world foods' area of supermarkets. Lemon juice is probably the nearest substitute for flavour.

The cake was a standard all-in-one 2-egg sponge mixture, with two teaspoons of matcha powder added. I baked it in a straight sided tin which was 7" x 4" (a 1lb loaf tin is a similar size, but I didn't want sloping sides).

When the cake was cooled I filled and topped it with a buttercream flavoured with yuzu juice - I started with 80g softened butter, 180g sifted icing sugar and 45ml (3 tablespoons) of yuzu juice. I then added 4 rounded tablespoons more icing sugar to make the buttercream firmer. Finally, I sprinkled about 1/4 teaspoon of green lustre powder on the top, in lieu of anything better to decorate with!

The flavour of the buttercream - intensely citrusy - was the dominant flavour here. I'm not sure whether my matcha powder isn't very strongly flavoured, or I'm just not using enough of it, but the flavour just wasn't coming through. However, the yuzu flavour alone was enough to make this delicious.

AlphaBakes (rules here) is a baking challenge hosted alternately by Caroline at Caroline Makes and Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker. The idea is to bake something either whose name begins with the randomly chosen letter for the month, or one of the major flavouring ingredients begins with that letter. This month the letter chosen is Y and Ros is the host who will be doing a round up of entries at the end of the month.