Let's make Lychee Cake!

Lychee!!

I have heard it pronounced:

a) LEE-chee
b) LIE-chee
c) LIH-chee

and no one knows the truth! I stick with lee-chee, because it just sounds cuter that way. Lychee is a funny flavor, almost like grapes. Not too sweet, and a blast to peel out of the shell if you ever get the chance.

I saw a recipe for lychee cupcakes, which sounded as cute as it did tasty. But since we didn't have the cupcake rounds, i thought i'd find a recipe for Lychee Cake.


First thing to do was to open a can of wupass!
Or, lychees. Mine came from Trader Joe's, back before the white man was scared of them and decided not to buy them.

Here they are, looking like a cross between olives and eyeballs. Hmmm. They taste really good, honestly!

I cut them into small pieces firstly while the oven is preheating.


Then, i mixed the rest of the ingredients. The whole point of a lychee cake, i thought, was to have the flavor of lychees shine through (there were other recipes that asked to include vanilla. What's the point, i thought.)

It's been awhile, but i'm guessing it was flour, white sugar, butter, baking flour, etc. Pretty simple cake recipe.

Then, i rolled the lychees in some sweet potato starch. Or flour. Hmmm. One of the two. Ok, i think flour. They have a really funny texture- almost gelatanous. So if you drop them in, supposedly the batter would not stick to them.

Hence, the flouring.

Come to think of it, this looks like i'm cooking octopus again.








Then, the baking! When i pulled this out, there were curious little marks, as if i was pulling a golden moon out of my oven, and not a tasty lychee cake.

One recipe suggested a lemon-powdered sugar frosting, but again, i thought that the taste of the lychee was most important.




And.... i pulled the funny cake out of the oven....

Ta daa!

Hmmm.... a bit underwhelming. While Japanese cooking is often described as "subtle," this was a bit too subtle for me, even for a cake. The texture was pretty nice, good and moist. But the lychee flavor was pretty much lost.

If i made this recipe again, i would consider adding those ingredients that i was poo-pooing (i.e. vanilla, lemon frosting). But i also feel that would make the recipe seem less like Elizabeth Andoh and more like Rachel Ray.

But, then again, if it tastes nice, that should be enough.

Better luck next time, Lychee Cake.