Black sesame chiffon cake

This black sesame chiffon cake is the poster cake for Keiko Ishida's japanese desserts book Okashi Treats. I've had it for quite a few years now, and have tried making several of her recipes in the past couple of years (which generally turned out well). But perhaps the idea of making and creaming a chiffon cake seemed too challenging before I took a proper cake decorating class, and so I never attempted this till last week!

If you're into Japanese-style cakes, this book is a good buy since it's written in English and gives anyone easy access to Japanese recipes/ recipes with a Japanese twist. I also appreciate the baking tips shared in the book - which should be very useful for most beginners. Japanese/ japanese-influenced cakes really appeal to me, and I've gotten a few books written entirely in Japanese in the past few months. Not too surprisingly though, the present me (when excitedly getting a new Japanese recipe book) repeatedly overestimated the perseverance of the future me in translating each recipe, and so to date I've only attempted a total of ONE recipe from these books..

But I will do better in the coming months! (or so i think... :))

For this cake, I decided to use a 15-cm disposable chiffon cake pan (which I got from the wonderful DAISO). Wasn't sure I'd keep making chiffons and so it was best not to add a redundant pan to my already large collection of cake pans. I finally got the chiffon out of its paper pan with some small crevices in the cake, but I suppose it wasn't too bad for a first effort. And in any case - everything will be covered up by cream!

The cake batter also looked more yellowish than greyish as I was mixing it; so slight tweaks were made to the sesame portion of the recipe to enhance my chances of getting a charcoal-coloured sponge interior. Thankfully, the colour came out about right. 

And to my pleasant surprise, the soft fluffly chiffon goes really well with light, fresh cream. It was my first time eating a creamed chiffon cake, but I'm now a convert! I've never really fancied chiffons as they feel somewhat unsubstantial and somehow fail to give me the feeling of sweet indulgence. But it becomes something quite different (yet not overly heavy) with some cream and a glass of milk. I think it's best enjoyed slightly chilled - so the chiffon still retains some fluffiness while the cream is cool.

I'd probably be making more of this next time!