Osmanthus Cake
Ingredients
Half a dozen xianxia C-dramas
Osmanthus flowers
Honey (or not)
Every kind of rice flour
The ability to translate grams to cups and to intuit how much a “scoop” is
Instructions
1. Fall into a xianxia hole. (In order to do this, you may need to become a fan of Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries, join Twitter back when she was still on it, and observe that a significant portion of her activity was liking pictures from the xianxia C-drama The Untamed. Watch The Untamed for Martha, and never be the same since.)
2. Decide that you must taste osmanthus cake, the most lauded dessert in every xianxia show.
3. Figure out what osmanthus is. Discover it’s the same thing as tea olive, and buy one despite the inverse relationship between how emotionally invested you become in your plants and how good you are at keeping them alive.
4. Figure out what osmanthus cake is. Don’t be fooled by phrases like “osmathus-flavored,” “osmathus-inspired,” or “with an osmanthus twist.” This step should take approximately three days.
5. Note the necessary ingredient, osmanthus syrup. Figure out what it is. (This step is a trap. Half of your sources will call it osmanthus-infused honey and half will call it osmanthus-infused simple syrup.)
6. Fail to find osmanthus syrup anywhere, but find products online called osmanthus jam. Figure this might be the same, since syrup is a translation anyway. Read reviews from buyers who received expired products and decide not to get that.
7. Make your own. Choose this recipe for osmanthus syrup because it uses a mix of sugar and honey, and you still aren’t sure which is correct.
8. Decrystalize your honey. Skip this step if you’re Winnie the Pooh or a weirdo with liquid honey in your pantry.
That bear needs a bath.
9. Locate a glass jar. Maybe you have a jar of expired mayonnaise and a jar of expired coconut oil that you’ve been putting off dealing with. Maybe the mayonnaise jar is just the right size.
10. Make osmanthus syrup.
I saw a face in it.
11. Pour your syrup out of the mayonnaise jar and into the coconut oil jar because it wasn’t big enough after all.
Just right
12. At some point in the last few steps, you should have made osmanthus tea since there are osmanthus flowers in your kitchen now. Wonder if it’s supposed to be radioactive green, but drink it anyway because you live on the edge.
13. Wait three days for your osmanthus syrup to infuse. Use this time to search for the steamer basket you haven’t used in years.
14. Make osmanthus cake. Choose the variant without sesame seed paste because you have no food processor. Since you’ve osmosis-ed some realistic expectations for the sweetness level of this dessert, put a layer of brown sugar where the sesame seed paste would be.
Ignore the large bits.
Some have layers, but it’s a surprise.
One configuration of cloth-wrapped/not cloth-wrapped lid; foil/no foil
15. Place a dollop of osmanthus syrup on each cake so they look just like the pictures you’ve seen. (You will add more syrup when you start eating because this really is just steamed glutinous rice flour and water.)
Pleasantly chewy and fragrant
16. Eat these while watching a xianxia show. For best results, find a scene in which they eat or talk about eating osmanthus cake. Say “I’m doing that.”
17. You’re a rice flour baker now. Make tang yuan. Make bibingka. Make rice flour pancakes. They’re just as bad as every other kind of pancake because you’re terrible at making them.
Tang yuan = glutinous rice flour balls in sweet broth
Bibingka = rice flour coconut cake (now in muffin form)
18. Bonus step Congratulations, you are now the owner of a bag of osmanthus flowers and a jar of osmanthus syrup. Mix the flowers with your milk oolong tea so you can drink it without thinking, “This tea’s on the turn.” Use the osmanthus syrup for all your sweetening needs, allowing your honey to return peacefully to its crystalline slumber.
So pretty, you might not notice the taste of milk oolong
