I've had aloe before, chunks of it suspended in jelly. I got my hands on a fresh leaf (?) of aloe. Here's a fairly sizable slab that I'll prep for dessert.

 Cut the spiny sides off

Peel off the green skin. The first side was easy because you could grip onto the other side. But when you have one side left to peel (and at this point there is quite a bit of goo...) it was rather tricky...

 I managed to get a relatively clean piece!

 Which I chopped into nice cubes

 And then rinsed under cold water

Oooh! I had this with coconut milk and honey. It was quite refreshing, and not as slimy once you wash off the goo. But aloe is practically made of goo, so if you chew on this for too long, you're just left with a lot of tasteless goo in your mouth. I just chopped it into smaller pieces so I wouldn't have to chew on it so long...

Cream puffs 3!

More cream puff tasting! These were 'cookie-choux's (クッキーシュー), which kind of reminds me of melon-pan. It's basically the regular choux pastry, but has a layer of cookie on top. Makes the exterior more cripsy/crunchy and sweet!

It looks really cool too. This one is dusted with icing sugar

The pastry cream could have been the tiniest bit runnier, but it was still delicious. Not too sweet, it was a good balance considering the cookie and icing sugar layer. And there are those lovely vanilla seeds :)

The patisserie we bought these from looked pretty lonely, so we had our doubts about the quality, but these tasted really good! I've decided I definitely prefer a crunch to the pastry (there are some pretty soft/soggy choux pastry shells out there!) and the cookie layer really helps.

This was a spontaneous decision. It was on sale at a cheaper patisserie at a mall.

This had a mixture of custard and whipped cream, which was yummy. As you can tell though it wasn't distributed too well and there was too much pastry and not enough cream! The pastry also seemed kind of chewy and almost... oily? Either way, there was too much of it and it was like eating a sandwich. Good to see those lovely vanilla seeds though.

I think I'm getting the experience to level up to... a profiterole connoisseur??

This place again!

I love pizza. I had to try the other kinds. Above is tuna-corn-mayo and miso-cheese.

Mushroom-meat sauce and eggplant-parma ham-cream sauce.

And the carbonara again. So gooooood

Soft serve ice cream and jell-yyy

I was really full at this point, but they had all the trimmings to make a matcha kakigouri so I went for it.

Cream puffs 2

Katsudon for lunch

There's a patisserie nearby that we've been wanting to try for a while now and today we got two of their cream puffs. This one is garnished with almond and sugar, which was a nice addition to the crust.

And this one with sesame seeds. I preferred the almond one, because the toasted sesame seeds were too strong and it kind of took over the delicate flavour of the pastry cream.

The pastry cream inside was (too) thick; it was almost like pudding... and not all lovely and smooth like the cream puff I had the other day. Almost kind... chunky, if that makes sense (and if that doesn't sound appetizing, I apologize) It was pretty yummy though, not too sweet, so it worked well with the choux pastry and sugar. Also, this didn't have much of a vanilla flavour (this cream did have vanilla seeds, but not much)

And this was a cream puff from the drugstore... It was 37 yen. This cream puff didn't disappoint... because well, for 37 yen you can't really expect much.

Yep... I expected it to be pretty much empty.

I didn't expect all the vanilla seeds though! Wow. The pastry to cream ratio wasn't good, but the overall quality was pretty good considering the price.

Now I'm keen to try even more profiteroles...

Dumpling making!

 Nice and snug

 Ta-ran!

:)

Cream puffs!

Cream puff! So delicious! A nice rustic choux pastry with a dusting of icing sugar. Nice exterior, luscious interior. The pastry cream was a lovely consistency; thick but light. Yuuuuuuum.

 Margarita pizza

 A very saucy spaghetti carbonara. This was so good, I wish I had it to myself.

 Seafood peperonchino

 Half-and-half!

And naturally, gotta get at least 3 servings of soft serve.

Obento, ohagi and sakura mochi.

Strawberries aren't in season right now, so they are pretty darn expensive at the grocery store/farmer's market. Today though we saw some discounted ones (they were kinda ugly, slightly beat-up) so we grabbed them and I made crepes.

The crepes would've been great with the strawberries, but I wanted to take it up a notch, so I decided to make pastry cream. The only thing is, I didn't really plan on making crepes and such until before dinner, so I had limited resources... I made the pastry cream with low-fat milk instead of whole milk and cream, like I've done before. Soooo........ it was pretty meh.

 The strawberries were yummy, they made up for my subpar pastry cream.

Now I can't wait till strawberries are in season to make this again with proper pastry cream :3