So…
This flavor took some time to acquire the ingredients and 2 tries…
I first attempted to purchase Yuzu juice the day before the Super Bowl. Since yuzu is an Asian fruit, I went to the Asian supermarket, Uwagimaya, in Bellevue to find some YUZU juice. Unfortunately, some nice lady was serving some sort of Yuzu cocktail at her Super Bowl party and purchased all 6 bottles the store had in stock about an hour before I arrived. Baking postponed…
A couple of weeks, I tried the Uwagimaya in the International District and was successful in my quest for Yuzu juice. I also purchased a jar of yuzu marmalade, just as a back up.
On my first attempt, I used the Yuzu juice in my cake. I reduced the juice a little bit to make it more concentrated and used it to replace the milk in the cake recipe. When I tasted the batter, it didn’t seem overly strong, so I added a little more. As the cupcakes baked the flavor must have intensified as when I tasted the baked cake, it was extremely tart…almost like a sour candy. I think the acidity adversely affected the crumb of the cake as well as the resulting texture was very grainy, almost like a cornbread. I was hoping to balance out the flavor with a sweet icing and I attempted my vanilla soymilk “gravy” icing, but was unsuccessful. I hadn’t baked in awhile and the icing didn’t turn out very good. It was runny and grainy. I ended up taking the cakes to work with no icing and left a container of the runny icing goo nearby for people to ice their own.
When I was complaining about the sourness of yuzu, one of my managers suggested that Salted Caramel would make a nice contrast to the tart fruit. I found a cooking website that suggested sweet or salty flavors would help balance out overly sour tastes, so I decided to use her suggestion. I wanted to keep with the Asian feel and thought that Miso would provide an interesting salty flavor to the caramel.
On my second attempt at Yuzu cake, I used the yuzu marmalade instead of the yuzu juice. The resulting cake had a mild citrusy grapefruit-like flavor, which was intensified when actually biting into one of the pieces of yuzu zest from the marmalade. The texture was light and not at all granular.
I made a caramel and added a couple of tablespoonfuls of white miso after it was complete. After it had cooled, I added some to an Italian meringue butter cream. The miso flavor was very light but distinctive. I thought the flavors went well together. Yuzu Miso= YUM.
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