Palace Hotel Tokyo, Sweets & Deli · Since the 1920s
The strawberry shortcake
The Japanese strawberry shortcake is a sponge as light as air, whipped cream with almost no sugar and strawberries at their peak, cut into a perfect wedge: the national cake of Japan, and the Palace Hotel Tokyo’s is the reference.
Taste profile
Pair it with
A cup of hojicha, roasted green tea, or black tea with milk.
Fujiya introduced the cake in the 1920s, and it became the Japanese birthday and Christmas cake: a genoise sponge, Chantilly cream and strawberries, nothing else, every element perfect. The hotel pastry kitchens of Tokyo, the Palace, the Imperial, the Peninsula, compete on it: the sponge must be moist and light, the cream barely sweet, the strawberries the size and colour of the season, and the slice cut without a smear.
At Sweets & Deli it is sold by the slice in a box with an ice pack; in the strawberry season from January to March the whole city eats it.
The home version · serves 6
Ingredients
- 4 eggs
- 120 g sugar
- 120 g cake flour
- 30 g butter, melted, 30 ml milk
- 500 ml whipping cream, 35 percent
- 35 g sugar for the cream
- 500 g strawberries
- Syrup: 50 ml water, 30 g sugar, 1 tsp kirsch
Method
- Whisk eggs and sugar over warm water until tripled and ribbon-like; fold in the sifted flour, then the warm butter and milk. Bake in an 18 cm tin at 170 °C for 28 minutes. Cool and cut into three layers.
- Whip the cream with the sugar to soft peaks, no further.
- Brush each layer with syrup, spread cream, cover with sliced strawberries, repeat.
- Coat the whole cake in cream with a palette knife, as smooth as you can.
- Decorate with whole strawberries, chill two hours and cut with a hot knife wiped between slices.
