Monthly Recipe: White Chocolate & Wasabi Sushi Cupcakes!

This month my office is having a Bake Off competition (inspired by the Great British Bake Off) to raise money for those affected by the floods in Burma. If you feel so inclined, you can donate to the Red Cross through our Just Giving page. I was in the first round of bakers last week, and thought I would use it as an excuse to make something I have been wanting to try for a really long time. I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off, but the result was very pleasing indeed!

The recipe for white chocolate and wasabi cupcakes basically came from BakingMad.com, with some small tweaks from me. The sushi toppers were entirely created by me and my mad imagination (with a little help from Google images!).

White Chocolate & Wasabi Sushi Cupcakes

Ingredients (makes 12)

For the cupcakes

• 100g white chocolate chips
• 110g unrefined golden caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1tsp baking powder
• 100g butter
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 75g plain white flour
• 1tbsp wasabi paste

For the buttercream

• 500g icing sugar
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 160g butter
• 2 tbsp milk
• green food colouring

(NB. This made enough buttercream for 24 cupcakes actually, so you might want to experiment with it a bit!)

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 C and line a 12 hold cupcake tin with cupcake cases.

Melt the chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl over simmering water.

Add the butter and stir until melted.

Remove from the heat, add the sugar and stir. The mixture will become a strange congealed texture, but that’s ok! Leave it to cool for about 10 minutes and then add the vanilla extract.

Beat for 3-4 minutes with an electric mixer until smooth.

Add the eggs one by one, beating after each one until well mixed.

Sieve in the flour and baking powder, then fold in.

Add in the wasabi paste and stir until evenly mixed.

Spoon the mixture into the cupcake cases and bake for around 25 minutes.

Leave the cakes to cool.

To make the buttercream, place the icing sugar and butter in a large bowl and mix with an electric mixer until sandy. Add the milk and vanilla extract. Mix for about 5 minutes until light and fluffy.

Add some green colouring until you have a pale green icing.

Use a piping bag to pipe the buttercream onto the cakes. Messy but fun! Leave to set a little in the fridge.

Now comes the creative part. Using anything you can lay your hands on (icing, sprinkles, jelly beans, fizzy laces, coconut…) make sushi!

I can’t show you any of the shots of me making the sushi as I was mostly covered in food colouring and icing, but basically I sat at a table for the best part of Sunday afternoon last week playing with icing like a small child playing with plasticine! I think my favourite was the tobico (とびこ) made out of small sprinkles dyed orange with food colouring. They went really sticky and worked really well both in the gunkan sushi and as an outside for the maki.

When the sushi toppers are made, simply place them on top of the cupcakes!

Overall, I’m really pleased with these cupcakes! They tasted great (the wasabi wasn’t too strong at all) and, if I do say so myself, they look pretty cool too! They were also a LOT of fun to make! I got a great reaction from my colleagues, and hopefully, along with the other bakers in the office, I’ve helped to raise a little bit of money for Burma.

☆★☆

I’ll be back in September with a new recipe! If you have any suggestions, or perhaps you would like me to try one of your recipes from a book or website, please leave a comment below or get in touch! All the recipes I try on this blog have some connection to Japan and, because I don’t eat meat, they need to be vegetarian or pescetarian. I’m particularly interested in helping to promote Japanese recipe books, so do let me know if you have one I might like!