(Luffy whines)
(Japanese audio plays)
- Hello there.
Welcome back to another episode of Anime with Alvin.
Today, I will be making the devil fruit
from one of the most famous anime of all time, One Piece.
In the show, a devil fruit is a rare species of fruit
that gives whoever eats it a superhuman-like power
but makes them unable to swim as a cost.
I wasn't really able to find one of those
when I went to the grocery store,
so how about a devil fruit cake instead,
using the precious Japanese crown melon?
So first I'm gonna start by making a simple sponge cake.
In a stand mixer, I'm combining six whole eggs,
six egg yolks, 300 grams of sugar,
and a teaspoon of vanilla.
I like to whip this until it hits that nice ribbony stage,
about five minutes.
While that ribbons are working,
I'm sifting 225 grams of cake flour,
two teaspoons of baking powder,
and half a teaspoon of kosher salt
onto a sheet of parchment paper.
Whoop, a little volcano.
And then I'm combining 50 grams of unsalted butter
and 120 grams of whole milk
into a sauce pan and melting it off camera.
Once those ribbons are nice and beautiful,
I'm slowly folding in our sifted flour mixture
using a large spatula
and trying to make sure I don't knock out
those beautiful air bubbles.
Once that's pretty much there,
I'm pouring that heated butter and milk into a bowl
and putting in about two cups
of our finished fluffy batter.
This acts is kind of a sacrifice
so that when we put this back into our original batter,
it won't ruin all the bubbles.
Because if we just put the butter in first,
that would've been a little messy.
Our finished sponge cake batter is now evenly divided
among two sheet trays lined with the parchment paper.
I kind of eyeballed this,
so one may be a little more spongier than the other.
After lightly spreading the batter into the edges
to make sure that we get a nice shape,
these go into a preheated 375 degree convection fan oven
for about 10 to 12 minutes
until everybody's nice and happy.
Back to our precious melon.
The Japanese crown melon
is a certain kind of muskmelon.
It's prized for its intricate netting
and super juicy insides.
I have a plan for this devil fruit cake, so bear with me.
First, I'm gonna take off the sticker.
I am the melon now.
Then I'm gonna slice off the top,
taking a moment to smell the melon
and appreciate its delicate insides.
Then after removing the seeds,
I'm attempting to take out the inside fruit
in as large of in solid of a piece as possible.
Now that the fruit has been removed,
I do have a plan for this to come back in later.
For now, we're gonna let the base and top
chill on a paper towel to drain any excess juice.
Good melon.
For a greater selection of fun fruits,
I've decided to incorporate kiwis, strawberries,
and mangoes into this devil fruit cake.
I'm just cutting these into thin slices,
roughly maybe a six to an eighth of an inch.
I did not have a ruler with me,
so results may vary.
Once the fruit has been sliced thinly,
I'm now moving on to making a stabilized whipped cream.
I personally enjoy whipped cream instead of frosting
or butter cream inside a light fruit cake,
so this is how I like to make it.
In a small bowl, I'm first blooming
a little packet of gelatin, about 7 grams,
in 80 grams of hot water, around 180.
Not boiling though,
because that will deactivate the gelatin.
While the little buddy blooms,
I'm now moving to a stand mixer
and whipping up 650 grams of cold heavy cream
with 50 grams of powdered sugar and a pinch of salt.
Once I see soft peaks,
I'm slowly pouring in that bloomed gelatin from earlier.
This whipped cream-- stabilized.
Hey look, our sponge cakes are done.
So I'm gonna take roughly
between 4 to 6 inch pastry rings
and cut as many circles as I can with varying sizes.
All according to the plan.
And I know there's gonna be a lot of extra scraps
or extra circles and extra fruit at the end of this,
and because I really don't like wasting food for videos,
I'm gonna make a nice big snack for everybody later.
Kendall found a beautiful trifold dish,
so I'm laying down our cake scraps
followed by chunks of our crown melon,
because it was actually too juicy and soft
for the preparation that we were gonna do later.
This is followed by our extra stabilized whipped cream
that didn't fit in the pastry bag,
and repeating with cake scraps
brushed with any of leftover crown melon juice as syrup,
different fruit slices, stabilized whipped cream,
until the very top is full.
I guess you could call this a fun fruit trifold
but this must go away for now
as we have business to attend to.
All right, so here's my plan.
I'm gonna make a fruit cake inside of this melon,
so I'm gonna lay down first the smallest diameter
of a cake that I cut out from earlier,
followed by a nice ring of stabilized whipped cream.
Then I decided our first fruit layer shall be mango.
This goes down on its nice cream bed,
and this is followed by another layer
of a slightly larger diameter piece of cake.
Brushing the cake layers with the excess melon juice
will not only give it flavor
but also help it compress more.
Then I'm gonna repeat with more stabilized whipped cream.
This time, strawberries and cake.
Now this isn't my original idea.
Making an entire fruit cake inside of a fruit
is commonly found in YouTube videos that I've watched,
particularly those really cool street food videos
showcasing vendors just really good at their job
and making a ton of these melon fruit cakes.
So that's where the inspiration came from for this.
Once our crown melon is filled to the brim
with layers of cake, stabilized whipped cream,
and various amounts of delicious fruit,
it's time to wrap this up
and let this set in the fridge
because it's now time to move on
to the exterior of the devil fruit.
Most, if not all devil fruit,
have a signature S swirl on their exterior,
no matter what kind of power they might give to the user.
This fruit and the Gomu Gomu no Mi
can be identified by a purple spherical fruit
studded with the signature S swirl pattern.
And I tried really hard to think of a creative, fun,
and delicious way to do this,
but I only ended up with fondant.
I'm first rolling out a large sheet of purple fondant
to approximately 1/4 inch thick.
And by using simple syrup as an adhesive
to the melon itself,
this will form a nice base layer for our decorations.
Kind of like if Thanos went and shaved his head.
Very satisfying.
To achieve that swirly S pattern,
I decided to make individual S's
that would go and cover the entire surface
of this devil fruit, which means it's a lot of work.
The strategy that I found most effective
was to cut thin strips of fondant, curl the front,
and curl the back in opposite directions to make an S,
then stick it right on the base.
But doing these all by hand
and going one by one took a lot of time.
I ended up sitting down halfway through.
Lower back problems are not something I want to have.
But at the end of the day,
I'm pretty happy I did this all one by one.
It definitely looks like a fruit
that you don't really wanna mess with.
Or do you?
And for the final decoration,
we're returning its nice curly stem
back to the top on its head.
And I present to you,
our version of the Gomu Gomu fruit from One Piece.
All right, just gonna go outside and...
Oh?
Uh, is this someone's fruit?
Nope, no one's around.
All right.
Guess it's mine.
(Alvin chomping)
Oh?
Uh-oh.
To properly serve this devil fruits cake,
I decided to cut it open for a nice cross section.
In three, two, one...
Ta-da!
I do have to say, those layers are pretty cool.
You can clearly see each layer
of cake, fruit, and cream
hidden inside this beautiful melon.
Although I'm a little bit sad
I wasn't able to actually incorporate the fruit
from this crown melon into it,
that'll come back in later.
But to serve, I'm cutting each half
into wedges and quarters.
This is how I believe they're commonly served,
and this is how I would serve it
if I had friends coming over.
Oh, this is really good.
It's a really, really light
and delicious fruit-forward cake,
but the fun part has that the fact
that the cake is actually absorbed not only the juice
from the melon we put in,
but also eating it from a melon
imparts a slight refreshing clean melon flavor
that I don't think you would get
if you just put melon in it itself.
This has to be eaten from the melon inside.
And in about 2.6 seconds,
this has now joined the clean melon peel club.
But wait, we still have our trifold.
Now I'm actually really excited to eat this
because this has the majority
of our melon fruit inside of it.
There's an interesting phenomenon when you bite
into the flesh of the melon
and it just goes juice everywhere,
but then the cake just absorbed all of that.
Now that is really cool.
Let me just get my fork for another bite.
Okay.
Ah, yes, there it is.
Nothing weird at all.
(upbeat music)