Alright guys, I know this doesn't look particularly appetizing, and that's because it wasn't. In fact, I knew it wouldn't be very appetizing from the moment I heard what this week's challenge would be (actually, from the moment I heard that the week's theme was Japanese, because let's be real, I don't like Japanese cuisine). But I couldn't let myself just give up halfway through and so I went out and bought some matcha powder for the first and last time, and gave it a try.
The recipe begins with heating the milk, sugar, eggs, and butter for the crepes. Then we opened up the matcha and sifted it into the mix with flour, cornstarch, and baking powder. Since we were in MN visiting my family, I had my trusty sidekick Sam to help me out.
We expected the matcha to smell horrible, but to us it just smelled like tea. We then were to strain the batter through a sieve to make it smooth, but we didn't have a sieve fine enough so we used cheesecloth and squeezed it out. The results were about as nasty looking as you might expect:
Next up was the white chocolate ganache. Unfortunately, I'm not really a fan of white chocolate, so this was kind of a double whammy as far as bad flavors for me. However, the ganache turned out well:
What didn't turn out well was the Swiss Meringue. I was supposed to cook the egg whites and sugar first, and then whip them up into a meringue. I tried once, cooking them to the correct temperature and then beating them for about 15 minutes, but they never fluffed up like they should.
I decided I may as well try again a second time, but the results were the same. I don't know what it was that I was doing wrong: we made sure the bowl and utensils were absolutely clean and wiped down, and we beat the egg whites until the hand mixer gave up the ghost (RIP) but still nothing. If anyone has made Swiss Meringue before and has any tips, hit me up. This has beaten me. I went ahead and invented a frosting recipe for the layers, mixing this "meringue" with the ganache and a bunch of whipped butter, and it turned out pretty well. Not what they were looking for, but it was salvageable.
And now the moment of truth: time to fry this gross looking batter into crepes.
I don't have a crepe pan, so I did my best with a non-stick skillet that wasn't quite big enough for the 30 cm crepe. I tried to make one big one and then a bunch of smaller ones, and it mostly worked. They looked pretty unappetizing.
Meanwhile Sam sliced the strawberries finely for me.
Then it was time to construct the cake. The recipe instructs us to do a layer of crepe, a layer of ganache, and then strawberries every other level.
I really can't even describe how absurd it looked. You'll just have to see for yourself.
Truly absurd. Then I wrapped the large crepe around the cake to cover it.
Bwahahahahaha. What a recipe. What a cake. This would be the week I placed bottom on technical.
The inside actually didn't look bad. I managed to get all fourteen crepes in there (for some reason on the show they only had to do 11 but Prue's recipe online says 14). To be fair to the cake, it wasn't nearly as bad as we expected it to be. We all tried it and everyone managed to eat a small slice expect Zach. Taken with the ganache and the strawberries, you couldn't taste the matcha in the crepes. The ganache did not taste too sweet or too much like white chocolate, but it was strangely salty (probably something I did wrong). In any case, this isn't something I'll ever make again, and it wasn't nice to look at, but at least we all thought it wasn't horrible. And that's all I can say about that.
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