베이킹을 사랑해! I Love Baking!

Fulbright Fall Conference was last weekend, and one of the events was a bake sale as part of a fundraising effort for various Fulbrighter-led initiatives. My contribution was a batch of persimmon cupcakes (with persimmon frosting!) and Oreo brownies! My friend Katelyn, who baked peanut butter-chocolate chip cookies, and I together raised about $70 for the North Korea Defector tutoring program in Daegu.

I documented my uber-baking process, which began at 6am the morning before I was to leave for Gyeongju. I got up before sunrise, baked for three hours straight, cleaned for one hour, packed, and was out the door by 10:30am.

The set-up: some new baking pans, a new muffin tin! And all the ingredients up top: peanut butter, persimmons, Oreos, chocolate... Dang, seeing this makes me excited to bake again.

Oreo brownies: one layer of cookie dough, one layer of Oreos, and one layer of brownies. Recipe from here.

The finished product! It was very sweet, but not as melty or moist as I'd have liked. Still, not bad for the first try.

Persimmon cupcakes, just out of the oven! I mostly followed this recipe from the Cupcake Project, but used cinnamon instead of pumpkin pie spice and also added crushed walnuts per a recipe I got from my aunt. (The idea was inspired by her own persimmon cake, so thanks, A-koh!)

Here's the first batch! Persimmon cupcakes, with persimmon. :) Cute, but a bit flat. Perhaps more baking powder next time to help them rise. Also, more flour to counteract too much juice from the fruit.

I also made persimmon frosting! Without powdered sugar (confectioner's sugar), I had to go with a recipe that used granulated sugar, but it turned out better than I could have imagined, anyway. Butter, sugar, milk, flour (?!), and one persimmon, whipped together like mad and refrigerated for a few hours. I frosted them just before the bake sale, so that it wouldn't melt. They were a hit. I even sold cups of extra frosting for a buck each; I'm not kidding.

Oh and here's another thing I did a few weeks ago: cinnamon sugar sweet potato fries. Yum!

I love baking and I will try to get better at it throughout the year. Fall is definitely here. How do I know? The weather is chillier and I've caught a cold. Time to try recipes with pumpkins (Korean pumpkins, 호박, are quite different from American ones) and Korean pears!

Hongshi Season

Yes, that is an Oshawott spoon.

홍시가 제철이다! Hongshi are fully-ripened astringent persimmons that taste like heaven. I got six of them for 3,000₩ (a little less than three bucks) from a vendor on the street, and I think that's a good deal. I've been eating them for breakfast every day this past week, and now that I'm almost out, it's time to get more. Perhaps I can bake them into something. I could also freeze them for a few months: instant persimmon water ice for Korea's super-hot summers!

For more on persimmons, read this.

감 - Persimmons

Persimmons are in season in Korea! There are two kinds here, both of which I love.

단감 (dangam) are sweet persimmons. They are small and flat, and look like orange tomatoes. These can be eaten before they are fully ripe, when they have a crisp texture and a mild sweetness.

홍시 (hongsi) are astringent persimmons. They are larger, shaped like acorns, and usually have a deeper hue than sweet persimmons. They must be left to ripen completely, attaining a pudgy, bulbous peel surrounding the pulpy, syrupy and delicious meat inside. (These are the kind that I grew up on.) Unfortunately, if you eat a hongsi before it is fully ripe, it tastes bitter and leaves your mouth feeling fuzzy and dry. This is the tannin at work, shrinking the salivary glands in your mouth and leaving a rather unpleasant feeling. Tannins -- a natural astringent -- are also found in banana peels and in some wines and teas.

홍시! Koreans also eat them dried, like Taiwanese and Japanese. They also ice them to make a kind of persimmon water ice, which is new for me. (LOL: as soon as I wrote the above sentence, my host mother popped into my room to hand me some iced persimmon on a plate. 무슨 우연이람!)

Another name I've heard to refer to hongsi is 떫은감 (ddeolbeungam), or simply 떨감 (ddeolgam). This literally translates to "astringent (bitter) persimmon". I like knowing this obscure vocabulary word, but I think I prefer 홍시, since it is related to the Taiwanese word I use for this fruit:

홍시 (hongsi) --> 紅柿 (hóngshì) --> angkhi
(Note: the common Mandarin word for persimmon is 柿子 (shìzi), not 紅柿.)

Some random facts: the English word persimmon comes from the name of the fruit in an Algonquian (Native American) language which means "dry fruit". They probably didn't wait for them to ripen enough before naming eating them! Also, persimmons are, botanically speaking, berries. So are tomatoes. I've been thinking about how long it's been since I've even seen (much less eaten) a strawberry, blueberry, or raspberry since coming to Korea... I guess persimmons will have to suffice.

감이 아주 맛있어요!