On Saturday night I decided that it was time to cook gumbo. 

Here’s Steve helping by stirring the roux (for over 10 minutes!)

Prepping the ingredients

And…it’s on the boil

The gumbo needed to cook for a couple of hours and I got a bit bored waiting for dinner to be ready. I was flicking through one of my Japanese cookbooks when I saw a recipe for Strawberry Shortcake – Japanese style. If you have been reading my blog you may remember that I ate a lot of Strawberry Shortcake during our last trip to Japan. I even had a piece on my birthday when I was sick with a cold. It made me feel better.

Yum! Anyway, I’d wanted to try and make one for a while, but y’know, life and stuff sometimes takes up too much of my time. I read through the recipe and realised that a) I actually had almost all the ingredient needed b) the whole cake only required 80g of flour, which is not very much and is a bit of a bonus because me and flour aren’t really the best of friends.

So I sent Steve down to the Service Station to buy some cream and I got baking.

The batter was really light and fluffy – almost soufflé like. The cake went in to the oven and whilst it was baking we had our gumbo dinner. Super delicious.

Then, the moment of truth. Did my cake turn out? Well, almost. It cooked nicely, but it stuck to the pan a little and didn’t look as light as fluffy as a Strawberry Shortcake sponge should be. I let it cool down good and proper.

I carefully sliced the sponge in half which was quite successful. I didn’t have any Kirsch on hand (being of Austrian descent I actually normally do 😊) which is what I was meant to put on the sponge first, so instead I used some of our recently made strawberry jam.

Then I put a whole load of cream and sugar and strawberries 🍓 on top of the jam, then put the top half of the sponge back on. I unfortunately (or maybe it was actually fortunate?) didn’t have enough cream to decorate the top and side properly. I was also a bit short on strawberries. So I just put a thin covering of cream on top and some strawberries. Not as pretty as it should be, but well, it was a spur of the minute decision to make this cake, so you can’t have everything. 

Tastes pretty darn good though! Almost like being back in Japan 🍰