The sheet is a chiffon batter with meringue folded in, light and springy, and the bitterness of matcha lingers after the sweetness of the cream has gone. How green it turns out depends on how briefly you fold once the flour and matcha go in.
Rice simmered slowly in milk swells and sheds its starch into the liquid, leaving a pudding somewhere between porridge and custard. Served warm, it is loose and spoonable; chilled overnight, it firms into something denser and closer to a set custard. Cinnamon goes on at the last moment so its aroma arrives before the first bite.
White chocolate melted with butter, rather than dark chocolate or cocoa, makes up the base, and matcha turns the whole pan bright green. The cocoa butter in white chocolate is what gives these a dense, fudgy chew instead of a cakey crumb. Chips stirred into the batter only half melt, leaving small pockets of concentrated sweetness.
Bite into one and the bitter cocoa on the outside comes first, then the dark rum rises behind it. Nothing is baked, so the rum's alcohol stays in, which makes these firmly an adult treat.
Bite into one and the sugared cookie shell cracks first, then the milk bread underneath gives way like a cloud. Despite the name, there is no melon in it; the crosshatch scored into the cookie layer is meant to look like a melon's rind. A rather low oven sets that shell without letting it brown much, while the bread keeps rising underneath into a dome. Eat them the day they are baked, within a few hours, while the crust still crackles.
Thin slices of ginger simmered in sugar syrup until glossy and slightly translucent, then rolled in sugar, taste sweet first and warm with ginger after. Slices cut to an even thickness soften and take up syrup at the same pace. The finishing sugar goes on only once the pieces have cooled and lost their wet surface, because on warm, sticky ginger it simply dissolves instead of forming a crystal coat.
Made from nothing but egg whites and sugar whipped to a stiff gloss, with no flour or butter, these shatter into light, dry crumbs. The oven is kept low because the goal is to dry them out rather than bake them, and a pale, nearly white finish is what you are after. Folding cocoa powder into part of the meringue gives a second flavor from the same batch. Humidity is their weak point: left out in the air, the shells soften and turn sticky.
No commercial yeast goes in: a ferment built from glutinous rice and rice koji raises the dough and leaves a clean, sweet aroma in the steamed skin. In Taketa and Bungo-ono in Oita these buns were eaten for Children's Day, Obon, local festivals, and breaks in farm work. They take days, about one for the amazake and 2 to 4 more for it to ferment into a starter, before the red-bean-filled buns are shaped and steamed.
Puff pastry normally balloons in the oven; here it bakes under parchment and a heavy tray so it comes out as three flat, brittle sheets that can carry a filling. Between them goes a vanilla pastry cream thickened with egg yolks and cornstarch, cooked on the stove until it holds a line. A fork pressed through the stack breaks the flaky layers first and then meets smooth, cool custard.
A thin, crepe-like wheat wrapper folds around smooth red bean paste, and a salt-preserved Oshima cherry leaf, veined side out, wraps it again so its aroma reaches the wrapper and filling. The Tokyo style traces back to 1717, when Shinroku Yamamoto, a gatekeeper at Chomeiji by the Sumida River, salted fallen cherry leaves and used them to wrap sweets.
Cocoa and instant coffee darken the crumb of this cake, and small dots of sweet red bean paste sit scattered through the middle. Most bites are bittersweet mocha; every so often you hit a moist pocket of bean paste whose sweetness tones down the bitter coffee. The top is raked with a fork before baking, which leaves a rough, homey surface rather than a smooth glaze.
Despite the name, no seawater goes in: drinking water and salt season a sugar and corn syrup boil that is cooled, then pulled and folded until pale and satiny. Pulling, not whipping or molding, builds the chewy texture that separates taffy from divinity or fudge. The syrup reaches 119°C, and a mass that feels cool on the outside can stay hot inside, which makes the long wait before handling the hardest part of the whole job.
Cut into with a spoon, the thin cake wall gives way and warm chocolate runs onto the plate. That molten center is not a hidden filling but the same dark chocolate batter, baked hot and fast so only the outside sets. Timing does most of the work. Residual heat keeps cooking the middle after the ramekins leave the oven, and the cakes are turned out right away to stop it.
One glutinous rice dough split three ways gives white, mugwort-green, and prickly-pear-pink balls, so the plate carries a grassy note and a faint fruity tang side by side. The balls need one more minute in the pot after they float; lifted out right away, they keep a dense, hard core.
Small balls of milk dough are dipped in melted butter, rolled in cinnamon sugar, and piled into a Bundt pan, so the finished ring is pulled apart by hand rather than sliced. In the oven the butter and sugar run down between the pieces and cook into a sticky, caramel-like coating, while the inside of each piece stays soft.
Two kinds of sugar, together matching the bean paste in weight, are worked into it for about an hour before the rice flours go in, giving a dense, chewy, very sweet cake. Despite the word miso in the name, no miso is used; one explanation credits three main ingredients added by the cupful, another the dough's miso-like look. The paste cools to room temperature first, which keeps the rice flour from partly cooking and clumping as it is stirred in. In southern Akita it was packed into tiered boxes and shared at family gatherings and during rest breaks in the farming season.
A single mugwort butter dough does double duty: part of it is pressed into a firm base, and the rest goes over a layer of mashed chestnut. That topping is just the leftover dough pinched into pea-sized bits and scattered, and it bakes up uneven and craggy.
Small balls of stiff, egg-rich dough sink in fairly low oil, rise after 20 to 30 seconds, then roll over on their own as one side splits open like a tulip. Okinawa's doughnut is thought to draw on Chinese fried sweets such as kaikou xiao. Because it keeps relatively well in a hot climate, it became both an everyday snack and a fixture at important Ryukyu ceremonies.
Mugwort powder is stirred into a dark chocolate brownie batter, and a swirl of cream cheese loosened with cream runs across the top. Both the herb and the chocolate lean bitter, so the tang of the cream cheese is what keeps each square from tasting heavy.
Molasses soaks into the lower half while the buttery crumb on top stays loose and dry. Liquid and crumb go into the shell in alternating halves; some of the crumb drinks up the molasses, the rest stays on the surface, and in the oven the two separate into layers. The molasses is unsulfured baking molasses, not the bitter blackstrap.
With 680 g of cream cheese, this is a heavy cheesecake, nothing like a soufflé cheesecake, and a fork sinks into it slowly. The graham cracker crust gets a bake of its own before the filling goes in. The cake bakes in a water bath and then cools slowly in the switched-off oven with the door slightly open.
Steamed sweet potato, trimmed into a neat cylinder and wrapped in smooth red bean paste, slices into rounds with a golden center ringed by dark paste. The playful name means a potato that rose in the world, a joke about Tokushima sweet potatoes once being shipped through Osaka under the name of a larger growing area.
Mixed nuts, toasted and tossed in a cream caramel, are packed into a blind-baked butter crust and baked a second time. The filling is mostly nuts held together by caramel that firms as the tart cools, and each slice crunches instead of turning sticky.
Thin pieces of chocolate soften under the heat of a just-browned marshmallow, while a thick bar stays hard. Because the overhead broiler browns the surface in seconds rather than minutes, stay at the oven door and pull the tray at pale gold, before any black crust forms.