Chef Mike: So the Koinobori cake is special for Children’s Day on May 5, which we celebrate in Japan. The cake itself is a chiffon roll with chocolate cream and fresh banana inside. It is designed to look like the koi fish. Families in Japan fly the “Koinobori” banner for each child in their house. Should we say flag or a kite? It’s swimming uphill or up the shore. So we kind of designed it to look like that. It has the little fish eye and the fins and the strawberry scales for a nice kind of cute cake.

We’ve been doing special holiday cakes for the Japanese holidays. A lot of places around here obviously don’t do that. We did get a few requests when we first opened years ago for Girls’ Day, the Hinamatsuri Cakes. So we decided to do specials for other holidays as well, not just the standard ones here in the US.

It’s been fairly popular, and we also do tend to get people that just think it’s a nice, cool, new-looking cake. So we get a lot of orders from people that don’t even know what Children’s Day is, and they’ll still purchase a cake because it looks fun and something new.

The texture of Koinobori cake, it’s lighter, not heavy sugar with whipped cream. And our chocolate cream has a kind of rich chocolate taste without being heavy. And then the fresh fruit inside, it’s a seven-inch cake. It can serve probably like five or six people.

We are currently accepting orders, and they’ll be available for pickup between May 1st and 5th.

I’d say this cake would be perfect for celebrating your children, and boys in particular, because there is Girls’ day on March 3. So why not celebrate boys?

Chef Misuzu:  I don’t know why we don’t call it Boys’ Day for this, but we call it Children’s Day in Japan. I’m not sure why, but we all know that this is for boys.

Interviewer: I like that. Celebrating the boys, that’s important. If the fish does look like it’s swimming, which is the most important thing is that it’s swimming upstream. Right?

Chef Misuzu:  Right. Rising in the sky, I think.

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Chef Mike: Ichigo Daifuku is a mochi dessert. Ours, it’s with Anko, Japanese red bean paste. Just sweet red bean, chantilly cream, and fresh strawberry, all wrapped in a thin sheet of mochi. We started doing it a few years back, five or six years ago.

We take a lot of influences, ingredients, and styles to make this one. It’s a very popular item in Japan, especially around this time of year because it’s Strawberry season. So we decided to put it together and kind of make our version of it. In Japan, traditionally, it doesn’t often come with whipped cream, but we added that to make our own style. 

The texture has a nice, chewy, mochi exterior with fresh strawberries in the middle. You get the sweetness and a little tartness from that. And the whipped cream kind of helps lighten the texture with the sweet red bean anko. 

We usually run it from trying to hit a good strawberry season, so we usually try and do it from April until the end of the summer. We started a little bit earlier this year in March. So probably run it like I said, probably until August, maybe September, depending on the quality of the strawberry.

And also the mochi that we get from Japan, still has some shipping delays and shipping issues with getting some products. So we’re trying to do as much as possible because I know it’s a very popular item and people ask for it for a whole year and see it on our website and start calling in January to see if it’s ready yet. 

So obviously it’s a fan favorite. So we try to do as much as possible. Right now we’re limited to 20 a day. We’re hoping we can increase that as we get into the summer. And we also limit it to five per person, five per customer, just so that we’re able to try and let people, as many people as possible, enjoy it. So one person is not buying up the entire stock, especially now that we can only do a limited amount. 

The best occasion is to make the daifuku occasion. It’s a nice snack or it’s also a nice gift. 

Get up to five in a box and bring it to somebody. It’s a nice little presentation, like a box of donuts or like a box of daifuku, and yeah, kind of a quick one.

We have it available from 12 pm every day. And we do have a line that starts to form around 11:30. I think there was one day we sold out in under a minute. We just put it out and our staff didn’t even put it in the showcase. It was just sold and done. So get there early, and good luck!

Interviewer: Perfect! Thank you.

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Chef Mike: It’s a cake made out of crepes and strawberry cream. We add 16 layers of crepes and cream to make our millecrepe. 16 thin crepes stacked up with strawberry cream in between each layer. We make our strawberry cream from our homemade strawberry jam and whipped cream. 

Each thin crepes are about eight to nine-inch that we make it by hand. And as I said we use 16 crepes for each millecrepe, so it’s a bit labor intensive, making process plus layering each one. We layer each crepe down, spread the strawberry cream on each layer individually, and then the top layer is we glaze it with the light apricot glaze and adds snow sugar and raspberry powder on top to give it a nice little red accent, and then fresh strawberries as well. 

We also serve it with a strawberry balsamic sauce, which contains strawberry jam and balsamic vinegar. The flavor is nice, with a nice creamy texture in between the layers. Our crepe is a little bit chewier crepe, so it’s not very like a hard-style crepe. So you get a little nice little chewy texture with the cake as well. 

And we do two different sizes of strawberry millecrepe. The larger one, it’s 8.5 inches full size. And then we make a strawberry crepe cake, which is 4.5 inches and is made in a slightly different style. So, we don’t call the smaller one a millecrepe. The millecrepe comes from the mille, meaning 1000. So it’s supposed to be like 1000 layers, but we don’t do 1000 layers. But for the smaller one, we do a different version so it’s not stacked, but is made with our crepes in the same strawberry cream. And it’s folded in different ways to give it extra layers and texture on the inside.

Interviewer: Anything you wanted to add to that? Misuzu?

Chef Misuzu: Yeah. I think that the highlight of this cake is the texture when you put the fork in, you can see all the layers and then you can feel that the crepe is just cutting through and I think just enjoy the texture as well as the flavor. 

Interviewer: Perfect! Thank you.

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Chef Mike: We make our Strawberry Shortcake with a sponge cake with chantilly cream and fresh strawberries. The sponge is really light, the flavors are kind of focused on the freshness of the ingredients. The sponge cake has a very light flavor, but there’s whipped cream and a little bit of cherry flavor essence to it. But I think overall, I like our strawberry shortcakes. It’s a very light cake, not like regular dense American cake.

We try and get the best strawberrie that we can, and I think it makes the cake special. Our Strawberry Shortcake is a Suzuya original that It’s kind of come to be known as our signature cake. It’s one we’ve made with only slight variations from the beginning of our shop opening. It has been our most popular, our bestseller, of all time. 

It’s not something that is a really heavy dessert, so it can go after a meal like after birthday parties, having friends over, or any other gathering.

And the one little insider note, if you do get a strawberry shortcake, it might be too large for your group and you have some leftovers. You can freeze it, get a little vanilla ice cream, a little bit of half and half for milk, and throw it all in a blender and make yourself a strawberry shortcake milkshake.

Interviewer: Anything you wanted to add to that? Misuzu?

Chef Misuzu: Our bestseller is Strawberry Shortcake, I think the reason is that everyone loves strawberries. The white whipped cream and the perfect red strawberry combination make it festive and pretty too. Foodies are very into all the aspects of each food like pictures and contrast, as well as taste. We have all the aspect that people are looking for in cakes.

Interviewer: Perfect! Thank you.

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Chef Mike: Tokyo cheesecake is kind of our name for Japanese-style cheesecake. It’s a little bit lighter in texture than, like, a New York cheesecake or kind of more traditional cheesecakes. It has a good cream cheese flavor. We use cream cheese and mascarpone in our recipe, so it’s not a really strong cheesy flavor. Not too strong, or overpowering, but definitely has that nice cream cheese texture flavor to it. 

Details of Tokyo cheesecake are that we bake it on a layer of sponge cake, so it has a little layer of sponge cake on the bottom and the cheesecake on top. 

We do offer both preorders and in-store pickup. We have 4.5 inches and 8.5 inches size available. Comes with an apricot glaze, so it gives it a little nice apricot flavor to it. It’s not too heavy, so it gives it a little extra flavor. 

And we can also do a special decoration on top of Tokyo cheesecake, which is Chef’s Choice. We’ll make those when we have some time or want to make some extra things for the showcase. Usually, we’ll put some whipped cream and some macarons, and fruit on top. It is Chef’s Choice, so whoever is decorating it will kind of use their own kind of ideas for the decoration. We do offer those for preorder as well. 

If the customer has certain things, like allergies or certain color schemes, we try to accommodate that as much as possible. But we don’t really take custom decorations requests like adding a certain fruit, additional flavor, or color. If customers request something blue for a boy’s birthday or pink for a girl’s birthday, we cannot do that, though try our best to accommodate. 

Interviewer: Okay. Thank you so much for all the details about the Tokyo Cheesecake. 

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Chef Mike: So for April desserts, the only thing that we have is some items for Easter.

We had some little bunny and chick macarons and little carrot decorations on top of our signature strawberry shortcake for Easter. And those are pre-orders only. There will also be a Bunny Strawberry roll cake.

So we are kind of focusing a lot on the holidays now. Trying to do some more specials on the holidays. All the desserts we’re working on for each holiday are literally good. I’ve started running and everybody is very excited.

Another April special would be Ichigo Daifuku. Our inventory is very limited right now just because of getting products from Japan. Still a little tight. We hope maybe by the end of April we’ll be able to start increasing the numbers of each item a bit. Right now we’re only doing 20 daifuku a day. I think the first day, it sold out in like under a minute. So, many customers have been like, why only sell 20 a day? But right now, because of limited ingredients, we cannot make a lot a day. We hope eventually we can increase the numbers though.

We have also been working on some of the cafe menus like the Anko Butter Sando, trying to get some new things out there and some little things. 

Now that we have a new chef, Miyuki, and another new Chef on the way, we’re hopefully going to have a little bit more time to kind of do a few more things, new specials or new holiday items, or add items back on the menu. 

Interviewer: That’s awesome, perfect. I love that recommended desserts in April.

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Chef Mike: We have the Hinamatsuri special, which is going to be on pre-order soon. There’s a rare cheesecake with Sakura jelly for girls’ day.

And we are also working on Matcha Gateau Chocolate for St. Patrick’s Day which we’ll have that special probably the week before up until St. Patrick’s Day. This is green tea and white chocolate cake. It’s kind of like a denser texture, more like a brownie kind of texture with a good green tea flavor and the cream on top.

And other spring desserts, big news. We have the Ichigo daifuku starting this weekend. It will be very limited for the first couple of months while we wait for some products to come in fully. As I said, the numbers will be limited and limited per each customer can order at one time. They won’t be available for pre-order, just what we make in-store. But first come, first serve. 

Interviewer: Thank you!

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Chef Mike: So, yeah, we just started selling our homemade strawberry jam at the shop. 

We had all the things from the health department, so we can sell them for grab and go. We make the strawberry jam 100% fresh in-house. We use fresh strawberries, usually kind of the ones that don’t look pretty enough to make it to the strawberry shortcake. 

We cook that down with sugar and a little bit of Trefilio. So it’s all-natural, with no preservatives made with it, so there’s no extra stuff added.

We don’t list the expiration date but use by date is written which is seven days, but it’s good for much longer than that. 

But what should we eat it with? We sell our Shokupan in stores – homemade. So we recommend the jam with our bread. We also sell hot sandwiches that have a warm peanut butter and jelly sandwich that we use homemade strawberry jam on. 

It would be good on the cheesecake too if you like doing it like a strawberry cheesecake or I guess whatever you like. Strawberry crackers. 

Chef Misuzu:  We’re making strawberry-flavored tea with strawberry jam as well. So you can try that at home too.

Hopefully, we can sell it for a long time, but we don’t have a time frame, and it will be limited. We probably won’t have huge amounts in the store at one time, but we should have a few each day for sale. 

We’re still kind of working on the packaging. I like the jars we have, but that might kind of switch up to something else. But we kind of wanted to get it going once we got the new stickers and everything, so I wanted to get it before the holidays. 

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Chef Mike: There is one thing we are kind of working on is prepackaging our Royal Milk, Tea, and Matcha Latte bases so that we can sell them retail or grab-and-go. And we’re just kind of working on getting the packaging. It’s kind of been a little difficult to find something that’s kind of nice and fits our styles or gets in some samples of different things and tries to fancy some things up a little bit. 

So if we can get that up and running soon, we can start selling that. That way you can enjoy Suzuya beverages at home in 2023. As far as the drinks, we’re still running the Apple Spice Teas and probably that will come off as we kind of get closer to the spring. And we were talking about doing a few things for a spring menu, but maybe doing like Strawberry Tea or things like that. 

The next menu change probably will be more of a Spring or Summer for the drink menu. As always, coffee and hot tea are good for the cold weather.

Interviewer:  Perfect. Anything you wanted to add, Misuzu? 

Misuzu:  Apple Cider is our winter drink that recommends to customers. It’s a really nice drink, especially when outside is really cold. It comes with a whole stick of cinnamon and it’s just nice and cozy.

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Chef Mike: We have Valentine’s cake already set that goes well with hot chocolate. 

We make our own chocolate milk chocolate recipe. We don’t use any mixes, so we heat up the cream and milk with whole chocolate. And it has a really good chocolate flavor to it. We also use that in our mocha for the coffee drinks. 

Those would be the drinks I’d recommend for Valentine’s Day.

Interviewer: Please tell us about Valentine’s Day sweets.

Chef Mike: We have Valentine’s cake which is a version of rare cheesecake with strawberries, strawberry cream, and a little special Valentine’s plaque on top. 

We will also have some other small pastries we usually do, some Valentine’s Day macarons or special cream puffs. Since Valentine’s Day is on Tuesday this year, we are planning on taking the cake pre-orders from the Friday before. 

Some of the special pastries will be on the weekend, but we might save some of them just for Valentine’s Day, February 14th. Just something special just for that day so people can get it. I’m sure we’re going to have everything posted on our social media when we make some of these items.

Our new chef, Chef Miyuki been on top of the holiday specials, and she worked on Valentine’s Day as well. She makes handmade marshmallows for decoration and some handmade chocolates.

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