Ingredient substitution - In dire need, use this

I'm sure it has happened to everyone - you pick a recipe you like, you go gather all the ingredients and you find out that you are one egg short, there's less cornstarch then you thought or that the honey jar is nowhere to be found. So instead of baking you're looking for Winnie the Pooh or making a shopping list since you're going to the supermarket now and the baking is left postponed.

a TV chef known for substituting fish with sausage

Balls!

Well, fortunately there are tricks how to substitute certain ingredients to achieve a similar result. I went through several pages and picked out some of the most useful and interesting substitutions. Turns out that some of the less-available ingredients can be substituted easily and surprisingly many of the standard ingredients as well. However, as many of the sites note, nothing should be overdone and more than one substitution may yield quite a different product in the end - flavour-wise and quite probably consistency-wise too.

Ginger and Spice Pear Cake

Last week it was quite cold here in Prague. I met up with a friend of mine after not seeing each other for a very long time and to hide from the cold weather, we popped in a café of sorts where I ordered a hot pear juice with cloves. It was so good that I wondered if I could make something like that but in a cake.

Turns out I can. I found this one recipe and changed more to my liking. The original called for some ingredients I had to substitute (which gave me an idea for another post). It also looked like a pie-cake hybrid... The way my cake turned out was almost traditional cake. The high amount of liquids in it give the cake a very soft and moist texture and the spices complement each other phenomenally. I just wish it looked a bit better because I'm afraid its looks won't attract any attention.

Also this recipe marks the very first time I made a video recipe. There is a Boardgames & Baking Youtube channel and the first video is me making this cake. I don't know how well and how far this will go but I found out that making videos is easier than I had thought.

Mushipan

From time to time I host a guest from abroad at my place through a site called CouchSurfing. Last weekend I had a Japanese guest who told me about a kind of Japanese muffin. It is highly customizable and easy to prepare just like a muffin but it is actually not baked.

Mushipan stands for "steamed bread" (roughly translated) and it figures that it is prepared over steam. This was my first time actually making something by steaming it if I don't count the times I warmed up jam filled dumplings... It's a Czech thing.

I had my expectations about mushipan and I must say that in the end, I estimated it's taste pretty well. It IS similar to fruit dumpling but it lacks the fruit in it. As I researched mushipan more, I found out that they don't really fill them with anything, not fruit. Sweet potato maybe but not fruit. Also no cinnamon or anything, it seems.