In Japan, a cake that’s “imperfect” can sometimes be perfect.
Whenever we’re not eating sweets, you can find us on the Internet, searching for sweets, and the rarer they are, the better. So when our reporter Natsuki Gojo discovered an odd-looking pack of cakes online, she immediately stopped browsing, and when she leaned in and discovered that it was a kilo (2.2 pounds) of cake ends from the cakes served to Japan Airlines’ first-class passengers, she wasted no time in clicking the purchase button.
Marked as “wake ari” (“imperfect”), Urokoya Sohonten’s “Premium Cake Ends” are inherently imperfect – as off-cuts from the manufacturing process, they would usually be discarded rather than presented for serving. The taste is the same as the more beautiful bits in between the ends, though, and given that they’re made by a long-established confectionery shop founded in 1684, Natsuki was far more interested in the flavour than the presentation.
Still, when they arrived on her doorstep, the cake ends looked beautiful to her eye, with two packs containing four neat towers, and each pack weighing around 500 grams.
Though she’d thought that “cake ends” might turn out to be small bits and leftover scraps, these were far bigger than she imagined, and looked like cakes in their own right.
▼ Comparing the size with a Sylvanian Families baby, and a human hand, gives you an idea of just how big these cakes are.
▼ Plenty of thickness in both the sponge and fresh cream.
She was surprised by how hefty they were too, because when she went to take a selfie with them, she found they were difficult to hold.
The cake ends arrive frozen, which is great as you can thaw only as much as you want to eat.
▼ The pack comes with stickers for jotting down the date you thaw it.
Each slice is about 16–17 centimetres (6.3–6.7 inches) long and a little over 1.5 centimetres (0.6 inches) thick, so it’s a generous serving.
After opening the pack and popping one of the slices on a plate, Natsuki cut it in half, which made it basically the same size as a regular piece of cake. Taking a taste, it was just as delicious as she’d hoped, with a dense yet fluffy sponge adding a soft sweetness to the fresh cream sandwiched inside of it.
The fresh cream was only mildly sweet, so Natsuki felt like she could easily eat to her heart’s content, and the flavours were incredibly well-balanced, which is a sign of a well-made, high-quality sweet.
▼ So this is what First Class tastes like!
While the cake can be eaten as is, because the flavour is simple, you can customise it to your liking. Natsuki chopped up the other half and added chocolate sauce, nuts and mint to make a decadent mini parfait, and it was utterly delicious.
With every mouthful, Natsuki felt like she was enjoying both a stylish cafe experience and a taste of first-class luxury in her own home. She now says she might just be hooked on these first-class cakes, and is chuffed that she found them.
If you’d like to enjoy a taste of first-class while not up in the air, these cakes can be purchased at the online store, as well as online retail sites like Amazon and Rakuten. According to the official website, a kilo of these cakes is equivalent to about 11 slices of shortcake, so at 3,999 yen (US$25.84), including postage, this is a very sweet deal.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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