Interesting cake ...

Do you remember that I went to Tokyo a few weeks ago for work and for the AED course? On the Saturday night I stayed in Nihonbashi (I'll tell you about the good hotel I always use another day) so I had dinner in Tokyo Station. After an early dinner, I happened to pass by Dairmaru Department Store on the ground floor, near the Yaesu Central Exit of JR, and as I did I noticed ....... NO LINE!

No line of what? People! There is a really, really famous cake shop there and they sell a kind of interesting cake. I know that most Japanese people know what "Baumkuchen" is, but until I came here, I had no idea such a strange cake existed.

(If you are reading this and you aren't Japanese, it is a kind of cake that is cooked on a horizontal pole. The pole is dipped in cake batter that is in a big tray, then the pole is lifted up into a long oven and heated. That first layer of cake is cooked. Then the COOKED layer is put back down into the batter again, so another layer is formed. The pole is rotated the whole time so the layers are even, like tree rings! The process is continued until the thickness is about 5cm. After that the cake is cooled and removed from the pole. It is almost always sold in pieces, not as a big round of cake.)

Anyway, back to the line .... the shop in Daimaru ALWAYS has a line and on busy days there will be 50 or more people waiting to buy cake. Unbelievable. Staff members walk up and down the line to say how long it will take to get served and to say which products have been sold out. (Wouldn't you be annoyed if you had waited an hour and just before you the last box was sold???)

So I took advantage of the rare opportunity and bought two boxes each containing a slice of cake. One was the plain flavor and the other was Sakura :)

Was it worth it? Well, the price wasn't so bad and the wait was less than 5 minutes so that was okay, but to be honest, I'm not a big fan of baumkuchen. I much prefer castella!

And after wondering about the name, I just researched it on Wikipedia and it says the German name for this cake is literally "tree cake/log cake". You can read about it here.