For the last couple of months, Instagram feeds have been jam packed with pictures of over-the-top decadent desserts. Stuff like donuts filled with ice cream, donuts filled with cinnamon buns, and rainbow donuts. Question: why do people have absolutely no chill about donuts? Anyway, the whole super sweet, dramatic dessert thing is a little played out and unoriginal. If you want to be successful in the food world, you’ve got to be creative, and one New York City market is about to put filling in donut holes to shame with a few very simple ingredients.
Smorgasburg’s outdoor markets in Brooklyn will begin serving mizu shingen mochi, a.k.a. water cake. Originally introduced by Kinseiken Seika Company in Japan, the “cake” is made with water gathered from the southern Japanese Alps which is then stabilized using a mystery ingredient. If executed correctly, the “cake” should roll and jiggle, but remain fragile and easy to break.
In other words, it looks and behaves EXACTLY like a saline breast implant. So much so that if a saline breast implant were placed in front of you at a restaurant, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference until you tried to cut or bite the thing.
The dessert is a variation on shingen mochi, a traditional Japanese dessert made from gyuhi. Unlike human breast implants, it is served with kinako, a roasted soybean powder, and a brown sugar syrup called kuromitso.
An advertising professional named Darren Wong took it upon himself to decipher the mystery ingredient and introduce the dessert to the U.S. He discovered that the cake appears to use agar, a seaweed derivative, as the stabilizer. Agar preserves the water’s taste while creating the cake’s desired texture. Wong’s version of shingen mochi, which he insists is about texture over flavor, uses only agar and spring water. He calls it “Raindrop Cake,” it has its own website and it will be available at Smorgasburg this spring at a price that has yet to be determined.
(Via Grub Street)
