(L speaking in Japanese)
(Light speaking in Japanese)
- [Alvin] Hello.
Welcome back to another episode of "Anime with Alvin."
Today, I'm gonna be attempting to recreate
the strawberry shortcake from "Death Note."
Now, the strawberry shortcake I'm making today
might be a little bit different
than the one you're thinking about.
This is the Japanese-style one, which starts
with a little bit of butter mixed with some milk
and heated in a microwave gently until just melted.
The recipe I'm using today actually comes
from a good friend of mine, Rie McClenny.
This is her personal recipe for a strawberry shortcake,
and she gave me the honor of using it for this episode.
I'm doing a little trick here
to get the parchment into the bottom of a pan
because I don't have any parchment circles.
This involves folding a piece
of parchment paper in half three times.
I promise I'm not making a paper airplane,
even though it definitely looks like it.
But after centering the tip in the middle
and approximating the radius, I'm cutting around it,
and I'm unfolding the parchment circle,
spraying the bottom of the pan with Pam, tongue twister,
and if I did this right, it should fit perfectly.
Pretty good. On to the cake batter itself.
First, I'm starting by adding eggs
straight from the chicken's butt,
followed by some granulated sugar.
And after that, I'm adding in some honey,
straight from the bees' butts.
I don't actually know if it comes from the butt. Uh...
Now I'm adding a heavy pinch of salt.
I really personally enjoy a lot of salt in my desserts,
and this is no different.
After a couple minutes of accelerated whisking,
we now have creamy, beautiful golden ribbons.
Now, that's nice.
I'm now sifting in cake flour.
As you can see, I'm clearly spilling a little bit
because that proves that I'm human,
and if you're not spilling when you're baking,
it's just baking.
Once the cake flour has been folded in,
it's now time to add the butter and the milk mixture.
I believe adding it at the very end allows the batter
to be silkier and smoother, although please feel free
to correct me on that.
I'm now transferring the batter slowly
into the pre-prepared pans.
A couple of love taps here and there
just to make sure that any large air bubbles pop,
and off into the oven you go.
This one came out badly.
I think the broiler turned on to preheat the oven,
and we didn't know that, so we have cake brulee.
I'm gonna eat this later.
With the magic of someone
as talented as Kendall on the team,
we managed to recreate another cake,
perfectly baked this time.
This smells good.
I wanna take a picture with my phone.
Look at all those air bubbles.
Once the cake has cooled down completely,
you can tell that it has deflated a little bit,
which is totally fine.
And to keep things stable during the assembly process,
I like to drizzle a little bit of honey
at the bottom of a cake turner
and then massage a piece of parchment paper right on top.
Not gonna lie, pretty nervous
to always flip a cake on my hand, but not bad.
Ooh, this is the best part.
It's like peeling the plastic off of a new TV.
Ooh, yeah, that's nice.
This cake clearly needs a haircut,
so I'm gonna slowly but surely use a very, very long knife
and evenly cut the top off of the cake's head.
Wait, isn't that just decapitation?
After decapitating the cake,
I'm just gonna go and eat the head.
Uh, cut the video, cut the...
Now that the cake has been turned upside down,
I'm gonna take the same knife
and now bisect it along its stomach.
Wow, this is getting dark.
The goal here is to use the cake turner as a way
to rotate and get the most even cut possible.
Once I've done my best, I'm flipping the bottom
of the cake onto a cardboard round.
This helps kind of hold the cake
and allow you to move it around your workspace as needed.
Here I am, holding up the two halves of the cake.
Usually, the thicker one is going to be on the bottom
because that's gonna take more of the weight
and compress down a little bit.
For now, these go off to the side.
Back to the stand mixer.
We're gonna now make the whipped cream filling or frosting.
One thing that I really like about Asian-style fruitcakes
is that the frosting is not very heavy.
Usually, it's just whipped cream.
In this mixture, we have heavy cream,
vanilla extract that I kind of eyeballed,
powdered sugar, and a big pinch of salt.
Like, whipped cream is great,
but salted whipped cream is, that's something else.
And this is my cake, so I'm gonna make it the way I want to.
While that's going, I'm preparing the piping bags.
After cutting off a little bit from the tip
and kind of eyeballing it
and after playing a game of is this hole big enough,
I'm putting in the pastry tip
into the bottom of the piping bag.
Now that I'm locked and loaded,
I'm transferring the bag into a...
Is this a magic bullet?
I'm transferring it into a cone-like vessel.
This happened to be the closest one nearby.
This is gonna make putting the cream
into the bag a lot easier.
I'm looking for soft peaks.
Oh, that's a soft peak.
After transferring as much whipped cream
into this bag as I can,
we are now ready for assembly.
For this type of strawberry shortcake,
normal strawberries are typically used,
but I wanted to have a little bit of fun.
We got these really beautiful Japanese strawberries.
They're really pretty and they're amazing,
but they're very expensive.
These are probably $4 to $5 per berry.
So as I'm trimming the tops,
I'm literally trying to take off
as little of the red as I can,
'cause that's a lot of money right there.
So what you see here
is approximately $150 worth of strawberries.
Absolutely not necessary at all, but this is my cake.
Man, that's nice.
And for the shape I'm aiming for the final cake to be,
I'm cutting each strawberry in half
in preparation for assembly.
That's a nice cross section.
Now, to begin assembly, I'm using a little bit of honey
to anchor the first slice of cake
into the bottom of the turner.
And to get the whipped cream as even as possible,
I'm piping starting from the middle
and working my way outwards while rotating the cake turner.
This creates a spiral shape that allows me
to use an offset spatula to get this cream
into a soft, even, beautiful bed for the strawberries
because they deserve it.
For the strategy of placing my strawberries,
I'm taking a quite simple approach,
working my way clockwise and basically just making a clock.
That's not a real strategy.
I just made it up.
All right, the first layer of strawberries is done.
Mmm, I just ate five bucks.
Instead of dolloping the whipped cream
directly on top of the strawberries,
I like to pipe in between.
I think this helps make sure
that the strawberries stay in place,
eliminates the possibility
of having air bubbles while frosting,
and also makes for an easy turning of the spatula once more.
This might seem like a lot of extra work
just to make a simple strawberry shortcake,
but for someone like me who cares a lot about presentation
and visuals and how satisfying stuff is,
I like to take this extra step.
Here I am getting a head start on smoothing out the sides.
I'm just keeping the spatula in place as vertically as I can
and rotating the cake turner, not the spatula.
I'm pretty focused on getting things lined up correctly.
Cake decorating is not my forte, and honestly,
it scares the crap out of me, so I just wanna make sure
that this is the best that I can make it.
This looks like a big iced cream sandwich.
Now that the top layer of cake has been set,
the goal now is to use the whipped cream
to sort of patch up any holes and add any additional cream
so that we now can begin the frosting.
So after filling the holes with my whipped cream,
I'm sort of spreading it into a rough shield
with enough room on every side of the cake for smoothing.
Now, this, this is the fun part.
Using a bench scraper, I'm turning the cake turner
while keeping this tool in place.
And if you do this correctly,
a smooth and beautiful cake shall emerge
from the rough patch of whipped cream
you have on this turner.
A couple of gentle strokes here and there,
a couple of touch-ups, and I'm calling it.
This is as good as it's gonna get.
Uh, the pastry tip broke.
Uh, I need a way to get it back on.
We are video producers, so we're gonna use gaff tape.
Also, Kendall was not in the room when this happened,
so shh, nobody tell her.
She's only gonna see this when she watches this video.
Here I am, piping little decorative shell shapes
to the top of this cake as a decoration.
Shout out to gaff tape.
You're the best.
And as the final touch to our strawberry shortcake,
I'm placing as many of these beautiful strawberries
on top of the cake as I physically can.
I definitely didn't need to buy all of those strawberries,
but it's always good to have backup.
After the final strawberry has been Tetrised in,
we now present to you our version
of the strawberry shortcake from "Death Note."
Not bad, if I say so myself,
but this needs to chill before we eat it.
After the cake has set up in the fridge
for about an hour or so, it's time to eat.
But first, a little struggle as we transfer this cake,
thank you, Kendall, onto a more appropriate serving platter.
The moment the knife penetrates the cake,
you already can feel how soft and fluffy this cake is.
When I cut cake for people, I cut big slices,
and this, this is a big slice.
And that cross section, it's pretty cool.
Now, that's a slice of cake.
Please hold as we admire it for just a little bit longer.
All right, I'm gonna eat it now.
Mmm. That's pretty good.
The cake is fluffy.
The cream is light, but slightly salty,
which contrasts really nicely with the cake.
But I will say the star of the show is the strawberries,
and yes, we did spend a lot of money
to get some high-quality ones, but to me,
this cake is about how everything works together.
And typically, this cake is seen as a celebration cake
for birthdays or parties or anything,
and I wanna thank my friend Rie again for the recipe.
This is such a wonderful cake,
and I wish you could've been here to taste it,
but I feed you a lot anyways when I visit you,
so you should be okay.
But for now, I think it's time
to let the team finally eat this.
(upbeat music)
I'm just gonna take a potato chip and eat it.
Just gonna write a couple of names
in this little harmless notebook of mine.
I got a people of people I got some beef with, you know?
So I'm gonna make sure
I write their names down, nice and legible.
Just stop watching, or you're next.