Sushi Cake

Updated July 4, 2019 with new pictures (at the end).

When D4S1 was turning 7, I asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday. I've made all their birthday cakes myself (except that one year that my best friend was in town and did it for me), because we found out when he was nine months old that he reacted to wheat. So I needed to know... chocolate? Vanilla? Carrot? Peanut Butter and Jelly? I didn't give him a prepopulated drop-down list, I figured he knew what the choices were.

His response was, "I wish there was a way to have a sushi cake."

That was not in the universe of things I thought he might say.

I asked for more information. "Do you mean a cake that looks like sushi, or a cake made of sushi?"

"A cake made of sushi!" he responded with enthusiasm.

"You know, I think I  could do that."

And so I did. I pressed a layer of rice into a springform pan, then added a layer of fillings, and kept doing that. And it worked!

Every year since, we've done the same thing. I've gotten pretty good at it. This year, R8S2 asked for one for his 8th birthday.

For the Cultural Potluck at the end of this past school year, D4S1 said he wanted to bring sushi. I reminded him that we are in no part Japanese. This did not dissuade him. I decided that, given its relevance to our family's particular culture, sushi cake was an acceptable contribution. While I completely failed to get pictures of them, I made two smaller cakes... one with fish and one vegan. I figured that sixth graders would be shy about consuming raw fish. I was wrong; that one reportedly disappeared in short order, while there were leftovers of the vegan one. Lesson learned.

I've now made nine different sushi cakes in all. It takes me about 45 minutes to do the actual assembly and decoration, but there's some prep work with making the rice and slicing the fillings. 

People ask how I do it. It's not terribly hard, though having the right equipment helps. Here's the rundown...

What you'll need:
Sushi rice (regular short-grain rice can work too, but sushi rice is finished slightly differently)
Rice vinegar
Sugar
Sea salt
Sushi fillings (vegetables, fish, whatever you desire)
Seaweed for decorating (optional)
Large bowl, preferably wooden
Rice paddle or other similar implement
Springform pan (I have never tried doing this in a regular cake pan. I really don't know if it would come out.)
Wax paper

What to do:

Make Sushi Rice

   4 cups Sushi Rice (uncooked)
   water sufficient to cook

Cook sushi rice per instructions. If you have a rice maker with a sushi rice setting, that works great. If it's a Zojirushi, that's 6 of the little cups that came with it (which are 2/3rds of an American cup).

Mix together:
   1/2 cup Rice Vinegar
   3/8 cup sugar (6 tablespoons)
   2 tsp. sea salt

until the sugar and salt are dissolved.

Dump the rice into a large bowl (a wooden salad bowl is great for this), and pour over the vinegar/sugar/salt mixture. Mix with a rice paddle or large spoon until thoroughly integrated.

While that cools a bit, chop up your fillings of choice. Our favorites are cucumber; avocado; sashimi-grade salmon,  yellowtail, and tuna; salmon roe; and shrimp (butterflied). If you choose to use raw fish, make sure you are using a source that is intended to be consumed raw. Use anything you like in sushi... crab meat, cream cheese, tamago, tofu... it's all good. (By the way, the shrimp come already cooked and butterflied that way in a frozen package from the market where I get all my sushi-specific stuff. I have no idea how to make them look like that.)

Take a 9" springform pan and cut a circle of wax paper that fits pretty well in the bottom.



Using a rice paddle or something similar (maybe a rubber spatula or something? I haven't tried other tools), press a thin layer of sushi rice into the bottom of the pan. I used to use my hands for this (get them wet first, so the rice doesn't stick to them!) but the paddle gets a tighter layer. Press it allll the way to the edges-- you want the edges really tight so your cake looks smooth and round (and doesn't fall apart) when you take it out of the pan. The layer shouldn't be more than a quarter-inch thick-- the thinnest you can do without being able to see the wax paper through it.



Add your ingredients in a radial pattern. This is something I've refined over the years-- at first I'd just line them up across the pan, but that makes the cake harder to cut. So I started arranging them in a radial pattern and that works much better.

More recently I've used even smaller pieces:

Now, repeat until you've filled the pan:

Next, turn it over onto your chosen cake platter:

I have another piece of wax paper here as sort of a doily for the base. I'm not good at making doilies out of wax paper. See, sushi cake does not require any great general artistry or craftiness.














Next remove the sides of the springform pan:

 And then the bottom:

This was when I was still figuring out how to line the pan. Now that I use the wax paper, it comes out like this:

Next you decorate. This is really just a matter of arranging things in an artful pattern on top. But this year, I actually cut letters and numbers out of seaweed to put D4S1's name on it:

The Sushi Cake has developed quite a bit over the years. My first year, this is what it looked like:

 I tried lining the entire pan with seaweed. It made sense in my head. It doesn't work that well.

For his 8th birthday, I used rice molds to try to make it cuter:

...but the seaweed REALLY doesn't work well on the inside of the pan. It just kinda melts.

I started to get that by year three:

That was, you'll never guess, his 9th birthday. After that, he said, "Mommy, will you please put the salmon roe inside the cake too?"

...but they're still fun to decorate with some.

By the fifth time, I was starting to get the hang of it:

And then this year is when R8S2 asked for his own:

2017:

2018 (birthday boy included):

2019:

 

And there's a detail of a slice.

Still finding ebi (shrimp) and ikura (salmon roe) to be the go-tos for decoration, but this year I found a small biscuit cutter that let me cut the cucumber slices into prettier shapes.

I made this.

I remember looking down at my approximately seven month old baby almost six years ago now, and realizing with a shock that nearly every molecule in his body came from mine.

WOW. Powerful thought, huh? At that point, he was still making "food face" every time we tried to give him something solid, so he was still pretty much exclusively nursing, as he had been since birth (aside from the 20 ccs of infant formula the pediatrician at the hospital pushed on us because we didn't know what a wet disposable looked like :-/). So not only had the original 8 pounds 6 ounces of him come directly out of my body, the raw material he'd turned into the next 15 pounds had, too. (Yes, my 7-month-old was about 24 pounds. That's not a math error.)

So I'm reading The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely, who is a behavioral economist at Duke University, and there's a chapter on the meaning of labor. Turns out, when we make things ourselves, we value them more. He calls it The Ikea Effect, and says, "...to increase your feelings of pride and ownership in your daily life, you should take a larger part in creating more of the things you use in your daily life."

This triggered my memory of that moment, when I realized this whole entire person on my lap was something I made (with some design assistance from my husband). How does that change how I value my child(ren)? Or, to put it a devastating way... how does the near-universal adoption of formula feeding for part or all of infancy compromise a mother's natural, normal pride in and value of her child?

A couple of pages later, he goes on at more length about how this phenomenon enters our everyday lives:

Similarly, we think we will not enjoy assembling furniture, so we buy the ready-made version. We want to enjoy movies in surround sound, but we imagine the stress involved in trying to connect a four-speaker stereo system to a television, so we hire someone else to do it for us. We like sitting in a garden but don't want to get sweaty and dirty digging up a garden space or mowing the lawn, so we pay a gardener to cut the grass and plant some flowers. We want to enjoy a nice meal, but shopping and cooking are too much trouble, so we eat out or just pop something in the microwave.

Sadly, in surrendering our effort in these activities... we may actually give up a lot of deep enjoyment because, in fact, it's often effort that ultimately creates long-term satisfaction.

Another WOW. This touches on so many things. People ask me "what do you EAT?" when they hear what I don't: gluten, dairy, soy, corn, eggs, nightshades (not to mention artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives). What I eat is mostly what I make myself. Yes, doughnut day at work drives me crazy sometimes, and there are days where my brain throws its own little fit at the idea of having to jump straight into dinner prep as soon as I get home (once I've gotten snacks for the kids, nursed the baby, and started the older one on his homework). Every so often, I think, "I wish I could just call Crispy Crust and be done with it."

And then I'm glad I can't. Because if I could, I would... and I wouldn't feel good about it. I'd feel like a cop-out, a lazy bum, someone who isn't doing the right thing. Our modern world tempts us constantly to cut corners and compromise, and in the process cheats us out of so much satisfaction. While our Big List of food allergies makes things tricky, it also forces me to make, invent, and create.

And therefore, to enjoy.