So…the 2nd letter of Dr Seuss’ alphabet from On Beyond Zebra. Finally. It took 2 attempts.
The “Um” wasn’t difficult for me. I always have umeboshi plum paste in my frig. Finding a compatible W flavor was hard. Watermelon doesn’t have any flavor beyond “sweet” when it’s cooked, so that wouldn’t work. White Chocolate. Wasn’t feeling it. I decided to go with wasabi since it was also an Asian flavor. The umeboshi plum is sour and salty and I thought the sharp earthy taste of wasabi would complement it.
The cake turned out quite good. I used a puree of plums and prunes (for color).
After mixing all the other ingredients together, I added umeboshi plum paste until it was a little overly salted.
The saltiness wasn’t as pronounced after the cakes were baked. The plum puree made them very moist and not overly sweet.
I didn’t want a sweet icing so thought I’d go with a mascarpone frosting. 1st mistake. I also added too much wasabi. 2nd mistake. Wasabi powder seems to take awhile to develop it’s flavor. I couldn’t taste the wasabi at all then suddenly it was overpowering. It also curdled the mascarpone. Gross.
It took a couple of weeks, but I tried again. This time, I used white chocolate ganache and added a very small amount of wasabi powder.
The ganache is incredibly sweet due to the sugar content of the white chocolate I used and I think it has a little bit of a throat itch quality from the wasabi. If the wasabi isn’t pronounced enough, I can call them White Chocolate Plum instead.
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