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Yesterday, I shared how I made a sushi cake for my friend’s birthday.  Today, I’m sharing how to make its equally yummy counterpart- a sashimi tarte! 

If you haven’t read the sushi cake post (part 1),  click on the photo below to read that post first because it explains the basic ingredients and techniques that I used to make these “pastries”:

Unlike the triple layered sushi cake, the sashimi tarte is a single layer of rice and a single layer of sashimi on top.   I used another cake stand as the platter for this “tarte”.  Because this sashimi tarte is flatter and I wanted it to be easy to cut and serve, I first made a seaweed base layer:

The seaweed base keeps the rice from sticking to the cake platter.  I pieced together several pieces of seaweed and used the ring of the springform pan as a circle outline.  I used a pair of kitchen scissors to roughly cut out the circle shape.

As with the sushi cake, I used the ring of a springform pan wrapped in plastic wrap as a mold.  I put it on top of the seaweed base and spread  a layer of rice inside it.  Then I pressed the rice down with my hands, using a sheet of plastic wrap on top so that the sticky sushi rice didn’t stick to my fingers:

The rice layer should be pretty dense and even:

I removed the springform pan mold and then came the fun part:  layering on lots of delicious sashimi:

I used salmon and tuna sashimi to make a fun, colorful design on top of the rice.  I got my fresh sashimi from San Francisco’s Japantown grocery store.  I would be cautious buying raw fish from any sketchy places.  The sashimi is normally sold in a large block and slicing it up is a lot of work, I’m not going to lie.  Make sure you use a really sharp knife and slice perpendicular to the “grain” of the fish. Or rope your husband into doing it for you. *wink*  Also, when working with raw fish, be careful not to contaminate anything, wash your hands a lot and work quickly.  Keep the fish refrigerated until you need to use it and serve the dish immediately.

I ended up with this design on top:

I used sliced avocado to make a little rose in the center:

I contemplated leaving the rose as is, but since I had a lot of fish roe, I scooped some of the ikura roe into the center:

I’m sure you can come up with all sorts of creative, pretty designs on top.  I was trying to work as fast I as I could since I didn’t want the fish to sit out unrefrigerated for a long time.  I was also frantically trying to finish this during Zoey’s nap time so it wasn’t perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it.  I love how colorful this turned out!

It’s really fun working with food!  You can really make a lot of foods into a cake form.  Once, I made a meat cake for one of my meat loving guy friends.  It was meatloaf on the inside with mashed potato frosting on the outside.  Ketchup was used as icing.  There are so many possibilities!

I hope you enjoyed these tutorials on how to make a sushi cake and a sashimi tarte!

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Jeff’s super lucky because since we moved out to San Francisco 2.5 years ago, a bunch of his close guy friends have joined us over in the bay area.  One of them is his college twin and roommate Alan, who moved out here with his wife just a few months after us.  Alan really looks just like Jeff, just a skinnier version.  True story, Jeff was mistaken for Alan at Alan’s wedding, by his wife!  Alan’s birthday was over the weekend, so I celebrated by making him a sushi cake and tarte!!    He is a sushi lover and we often double date at Japanese restaurants together so I thought this would be a fun, delicious way to make him a special “birthday cake”, made entirely of traditional sushi and sashimi ingredients.  I ended up making him a cake and a tarte, enough to feed four people for lunch.  The sushi cake is three layers and the tarte is flatter.

The beauty of these “sushi pastries” is that they can be made in so many ways.  They can as fancy or simple as you want, involve raw or cooked  ingredients, multi-layered or single layered and the sheer variety of ingredients that you can use allows you to be really creative! There are so many options!  For the cake and tarte pictured, I used these ingredients:

Ingredients:

• Cooked sushi rice seasoned with a dash of rice vinegar and a couple pinches of white sugar. Sushi rice is short grain and stickier than other types of rice. Three cups of uncooked rice was just enough for these two cakes.
• Seaweed sheets (nori) - bought at Asian grocery stores or even at the ethnic aisle of regular grocery stores. I buy mine at my local Safeway.
• Condiments: sesame seeds, wasabi, mayo (I like the Japanese brand kewpie mayonnaise), siracha sauce for those who like spice, rice vinegar and sugar for seasoning the rice, soy sauce for dipping
• Avocado & egg (I used 3 eggs to create an egg omelet)
• Fish – raw tuna & salmon
• Shellfish- precooked shrimp and imitation crabmeat
• Roe- masago and ikura

These are the ingredients that I personally like in my sushi rolls so that is what I used but there are so many other ingredients  that you can use instead.  If raw fish isn’t your thing, you can also use baked salmon or canned tuna.  I actually made the cake with all cooked ingredients for any guests who may not like eating raw fish and the tarte is made of the raw fish.  Its nice to have a non-raw option for people.  Here is a list of other sushi ingredients that you can use, too.

With all the photos I took of this meal, I’m going to break this up into two posts.  Today, I’m going to show you how I made the triple-layered sushi cake. Tomorrow, I’ll explain the sashimi tarte!

For this sushi cake, I used a 12″ springform cake pan and a cake stand that I bought for the cookie bar at my wedding. The cake stands and platters I used for the cookie bar have really come in handy for fancy dinners and parties we have thrown in the past 3 years!

The springform pan is used to mold the cake.  I only used the outer ring, which I wrapped up in plastic wrap to keep the sticky sushi rice from sticking to the sides:

Just make sure that you don’t cover the part where the latch is on the ring with plastic otherwise you won’t be able to release and open the ring later.

First, I made the fillings of the cake  which were to be layered between the rice layers.  The two fillings of this particular cake were made with imitation crab and shrimp, both which came pre-cooked.   For the crab filling, I shredded and then chopped up the crabmeat, then mixed with a little of kewpie mayo and masago roe.  This filling is similar to what you would get in a California roll.  For the shrimp filling, I peeled and chopped up with shrimp, then mixed with a little siracha sauce and mayo to create a spicy shrimp filling:

After the fillings were made, it was time to construct the cake!   I placed the ring of the springform pan on top of my cake stand and spread a layer of rice on the bottom.  In order for this cake to keep its shape, it needs to be tightly packed, so I pressed the rice down with my hand using a sheet of plastic wrap:

The plastic wrap keeps the rice from sticking to your hands. You can also use a rice paddle that is wet. The rice is so sticky, it can get messy really fast!!  You want to push the rice right up to the edges of the pan.  Make sure that its compact so that the rice is flat and dense, like this:

Next, evenly spread the crab mixture across the rice:

Spread another layer of rice over the crabmeat and press down with the plastic wrap again so that its compact. Next, spread the shrimp mixture across the second layer of rice:

Spread another layer of rice across the top of the shrimp and press down.  Once you have all your rice and fillings layered, gently release and remove the ring of the springform pan.  For this cake, I decided to cover the side of the cake with seaweed, so I cut strips of the seaweed with scissors and pressed into the side of the cake:

For the top of the cake, I made an egg omelet.  To make the egg omelet, I beat together 3 large eggs in a bowl, then slowly cooked on low heat on a greased frying pan, flipping it over when one side was cooked:

Once the omelet cooled, I placed the egg omelet on top of the cake. The omelet wasn’t quite big enough to cover the entire cake, but that was fine because I layered sliced avocado all around the edges and it filled in the gaps:

The flower garnish on top is made with shrimp and a dollop of wasabi paste:
The fun part was decorating the cake!! The possibilities are endless!!  I can see so many ways to decorate and garnish the top: cut up strips of seaweed to spell a word, sliced cucumbers, sprinkled scallions,  sesame seeds, furikake mix…the sky is the limit.  One idea I had was to use the ikura roe (the bigger fish eggs)  to decorate around the exterior of the egg of the cake. They kind of look like orange “pearls” to me!

You can also use the mayo or siracha sauce to make elaborate designs on the top of the egg omelet.  I used siracha sauce to spell out Alan’s name:

I stuck a candle to the center of the cake and it was ready to go!!  A tasty, healthy, unique birthday cake for a dear friend of ours!

Tomorrow, I’ll share how I made the sushi cake’s counterpart- the sashimi tarte!

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