To my very pleasant surprise, Mrs. M had formulated a plan for my birthday last Sunday: a made-to-order vegan chocolate cake.
A friend of ours has spent the past couple of years working part-time in a cake shop, while practicing in her spare time in the now mostly unused kitchen of her mother-in-law’s Japanese-style sweet shop. Although she still hasn’t given up the day job, this year she started her own business and is already receiving orders from friends, acquaintances, and through her Instagram account. The next step will be to build a kind of portacabin kitchen in the back garden (officially, you’re not allowed to sell foods and so on unless they’re made in a dedicated and officially inspected kitchen) and obtain the necessary health, hygiene, and safety certification.
I’m not sure if there was some kind of misunderstanding (Japan is still a bit behind when it comes to vegetarianism, veganism, or any other kind of ism, for that matter), but the cake was also gluten-free. Because we’re friends and this was something of an experiment, all Mrs. M had to do was pay for the ingredients, which were rice flour, sugar, salt, cocoa powder, baking powder, sesame oil, vanilla oil, tofu, and soy milk, and cost about 3,000 yen.
The result was so scrumptious – moist on the inside and topped with a generous layer of chocolatey, soy-based cream – that even M Jr. I and II ate a slice each, and with a quarter still left today, I decided to cut the remaining two pieces horizontally in half so there will still be some left to savour a week after the big day.
Incidentally, the cat-shaped cookies on the top are ingeniously modelled on our own beloved moggy, who I suppose I should christen something like Muzukitty, but is actually called Kyu after the Japanese for the number nine (九) because he was rescued by the same friend who baked the cake and given to us on M Jr.’s 9th birthday (as you might have guessed, M Jr. made the birthday card).
