French pastry shops usually fill eclairs with vanilla custard; this version uses whipped cream and tops the long choux shells with melted dark chocolate. With a plain cream filling, the bitter chocolate and the crisp shell come through more clearly. The eggs are beaten in one at a time, stopping once the paste looks glossy and drops slowly from the spatula.
Steamed glutinous rice dough has to be pounded hard for five minutes or more before it stretches into long, elastic ropes; under-pounded, it cracks soon after the soybean powder goes on. The roasted soybean powder gets a little sugar and stays fluffy only if the pieces are coated right before eating. Injeolmi is a regular on Korean ancestral rite tables and at first-birthday parties.
Ensaymada traces back to the Spanish ensaimada of Mallorca, but the Filipino version turned into a soft, buttery brioche finished with butter and salty cheese. Each bun rises tall with visible spiral layers because the dough is rolled into ropes, coiled loosely, and baked in muffin tins. Powdered Parmesan stands in for the grated cheddar or Edam common in the Philippines, giving a lighter salty edge against the sweet crumb. The butter and cheese wait until the buns have cooled completely, or the cheese turns soggy. It shows up at Christmas, and the rest of the year as a breakfast bun with coffee or hot chocolate.
Flour from parched glutinous and short-grain rice takes in hot sugar syrup, added in four or five pours, and turns into soft mochi without any steaming or boiling. The toasted-rice smell stays with it. Once the slab has cooled right to the center, a knife dusted with potato starch cuts it into bars.
In the Philippines, bibingka is sold outside churches after the dawn Masses of the Christmas season, baked in clay pots lined with banana leaves over charcoal. Coals above and below cook both surfaces at once and keep the inside moist, while the leaves leave a green fragrance and faint dark marks on the underside. This version swaps all that for a round pan in a regular oven, and it leaves out the salted duck egg and coconut slices that vendors press on top midway. Rice flour and coconut milk give a texture somewhere between a rice cake and a sponge cake: a little chewy, but still soft and springy.
Cubes of sweet potato poke out of each round dumpling like stones in a wall, which gives ishigaki dango, stone-wall dumplings, their name. On the Sagamihara plateau in Kanagawa, where volcanic ash covered the fields, wheat and sweet potatoes grew widely, and these dumplings were a snack between farm tasks. Holding back some of the potato and pressing it onto the surface makes the stone pattern stand out.
Browned butter does most of the work: cooked until the foam settles and the solids turn hazelnut brown, it gives these little almond cakes a toasted, nutty smell that plain melted butter lacks. Only egg whites go into the batter, along with almond flour and a spoon of honey. The inside bakes up dense and moist while the edges turn dark and crisp.
The Italian name means half-cold, and that is how it eats: lighter than ice cream, colder than mousse. It is frozen in its mold without any churning and cut into slices, with chopped pistachios scattered through.
The vanilla custard is thickened with cornstarch on the stove before it goes into the pastry, so once the tart is baked and chilled it slices into clean, upright wedges. In Paris bakeries it sits in the case by the slice, its top freckled with caramel-brown spots.
Flat slices of jeolpyeon, a plain Korean rice cake, are pan-fried in sesame oil until a thin skin forms, then a soy, honey, and sugar sauce goes in and the heat drops to low for just two or three minutes of turning until they shine. The glaze burns quickly, so the heat goes off as soon as almost no syrup is left in the pan, and sesame seeds and pine nuts go on top.
Sliced almonds go into a caramel cooked from cream, sugar, honey and butter, and small spoonfuls of it bubble up again in the oven and spread into thin amber rounds studded with nuts. Once cool they set hard as glass, snapping cleanly before the caramel turns a little chewy. The backs get a thin coat of melted dark chocolate.
Long counted as a summer treat, jeungpyeon starts with rice flour mixed with unpasteurized makgeolli, a cloudy Korean rice wine, and left to ferment for about an hour before steaming. The cake comes out full of fine air holes with a faint tang and rice-wine aroma, and it breaks apart lightly instead of chewing. In a cool room fermentation slows, and the small bubbles in the batter, not the clock, decide when it is ready.
A smooth, glossy top and a ruffled foot around the base are the signs of a well-baked shell. The almond-meringue shells give way from a thin crisp skin to a chewy center, and pairs of them sandwich a buttercream made with melted dark chocolate.
With no egg or leavening, the batter bakes into a thin, plain wheat crepe, and all the sweetness comes from the brown sugar rolled up inside. Rolling begins just as the sugar starts melting on the pan, leaving a sticky ribbon of brown sugar through the center of each piece.
Cherries or plums are laid in a single layer, and a thin batter of eggs, milk, sugar and a little flour is poured over just until the tops of the fruit peek through. Straight from the oven the edges are puffed and golden; after a few minutes they sink and the custard settles. Spooned out warm, each serving gets soft fruit, a moist middle and some of the browned edge.
Ice shaved into fine, airy flakes and topped with syrup made from Nara strawberries tastes light and fresh rather than heavy. Nara's ties to ice go back a long way: Himuro Shrine there is said to date from 710, and an ice-offering ceremony has continued there.
The ratio is what makes these fudgy: little flour against plenty of butter and dark chocolate gives squares that are dense and chewy rather than cakey. The center looks underdone when the pan comes out, then sinks and firms as it cools. Walnuts or pecans folded in add crunch.
White dough of potato and rice flour is layered with a red-bean potato dough, rolled into a spiral, and steamed, so every cooled slice shows a crisp white and red-brown swirl. Kamabuku comes from inland mountain communities in Akita where fish was hard to obtain, which is why it was shaped like kamaboko fish cake; it was sliced for New Year, ceremonies, and sports days.
In this Greek pie, sheets of filo, each brushed with butter, are layered around a semolina custard, and a syrup of sugar and honey goes on after baking. Semolina leaves the custard faintly grainy in a way a flour-thickened one is not, and lemon zest scents it. The syrup is cooled to lukewarm before it meets the hot pie, which keeps the top layers crisp while the bottom soaks it up and turns soft.
Wrapped piece by piece in red shiso leaves, green ume spend about a month in the fridge while the leaf's red moves into the fruit and the sweetness and sourness go all the way through. The method comes from Ogose in Saitama: the pitted ume are cured in sugar first, and the shiso soaks a day in ume vinegar before wrapping. The ume are raw, and nothing is tasted until the cure is finished.
Eaten across France around Epiphany in January, this pie seals an almond frangipane between two rounds of puff pastry. A small porcelain charm, the feve, is hidden inside, and whoever gets it in their slice is king or queen for the day and wears a paper crown. This version adds a little rum to the frangipane. A leaf or swirl pattern scored into the egg-washed top bakes into a sharp, glossy design.
Ten shiratama dumplings, each about 1.5cm across, go into a bowl of cold, clear syrup. The syrup is coarse sugar with a little white sugar and tiny amounts of light soy sauce and salt, simmered and then chilled in the fridge. The dumplings go straight from the pot into ice water, which keeps the whole bowl cold from the first spoonful.
Toasted puffed rice and sesame seeds, the core of gangjeong (Korean puffed-rice and seed sweets), are folded into a brown-sugar cookie dough. A little glutinous rice flour in with the wheat lets the dough spread thin, and the baked cookies crumble lightly when bitten.
Grated Yamato yam whipped with water traps enough air to lift this white Kagoshima cake without eggs or oil. Karukan took root where wild yam grew in the well-drained shirasu plateau and sugar arrived from Amami and Ryukyu. Sugar was costly in the Edo period, so it was served in daimyo households before spreading more widely in the Meiji era. Its name means light yokan, a nod to how the steamed crumb ends up lighter than the batter. Each of the ten small cakes hides a ball of red bean paste in the center.