The Butter Cake My Mother Hated and I Craved

I want to eat butter cake.

There is a reason why I decided that.

Embarrassing as it is, one of my hobbies is baking. After all, sweets are essential for making the brain work, and I have recently come to think that the process of making them is very similar to writing.

Gathering materials (gathering research), organizing the steps (creating an outline), starting from scratch (writing the text). See, they are exactly the same.

Setting that aside, when I make cookies or pound cakes, I often use the sugar-batter method. This is the first stage of making the dough, where butter is mixed until it becomes fluffy and creamy, then sugar is added, and then eggs are mixed in.

Yes. The buttercream made in the process before adding the sugar is absolutely delicious. I usually taste it at this stage.

The creamy, rich aroma of the butter, and the piercing sweetness of the sugar added to it. If anything, this is a kind of peak. It is a taste that could be called the best ingredient given by God.

I want to enjoy this. Forever and ever... If that is the case, it is inevitable that I would want to eat butter cake.

However, I hit a big wall here. Even if butter cake is a sacred thing created by God to me, to my mother, it was a heretical food.

The reason is that the cake that was familiar to my mother from her childhood to her youth was precisely butter cake. And she says that memory is the worst.

The Christmas that remains in my mother's memory is around 1965. Although 20 years had passed since the end of the war, Japan was poor, refrigerators for storing cakes using fresh cream were not widespread in every household, and it was difficult for Western confectionery shops to obtain expensive ingredients. Therefore, the substitute became buttercream, which was cheaper than fresh cream and could be stored at room temperature.

There seem to be various ways to make it and fine ingredients, but the basics are butter, sugar, and egg yolks (or egg whites). With these ingredients, unless you really dislike sweet things, only things that taste delicious are used. By the way, although my mother has always been more of a fan of Japanese sweets than Western sweets, she loves sweet things.

Then, why does my mother hate butter cake so much that it becomes a terrible memory? In the late 1960s, the cake my mother had at the family Christmas table was actually a cake that used margarine, not butter.

It seems that butter was also a luxury item, so it was not easily available. Moreover, since the quality of margarine at that time was not as good as it is now, it probably did not have the rich aroma or rich taste of butter.

If that was thickly spread on a sponge cake... the stomach must have been quite heavy. Stuffing your mouth full of just sweet lumps of oil is quite tough even to imagine.

I told my mother, "The butter cake you ate in the past was a fake. Let's prepare a delicious butter cake this time." Although I call it a fake, substitutes have existed for a long time. It is like saying, "Ingredient A is too expensive to get, but Ingredient B is very similar to A and can be obtained cheaply."

With that said, I prepared a butter cake for Christmas this year. I enjoyed the hard texture that fresh cream does not have, and I fully enjoyed the buttercream that does not have a sad parting even when put in the mouth.

However, it is a secret from my mother that if you look closely at the ingredient label, it says shortening or vegetable oil instead of butter. Both my mother and I enjoyed it deliciously, so it's all good in the end ♫

[Reference]
There is no occult: Buttercream cake then and now
Know the deliciousness! History and how to choose butter cake