GUILTY HOLIDAY

Here’s my entry for the School Idol Café contest :D

Since the theme was Home For The Holidays, my first thought was of course a gingerbread house, but I wanted something savoury, and then I thought, but what if GUILTY KISS were left Home For The Holidays and, uh. Left to their own devices. So that was the concept for this. Guilty Kiss being left with lots of ideas and ingredients and zero supervision, producing their own take on a gingerbread house.

Without further ado, I proudly present…

The CASTLE OF ETERNAL DARKNESS, surrounded by its ABYSS OF STEWSHINE, and which can only be reached by braving the trembling BRIDGE OF THE YEARNING OSTINATO.

The castle is Black Like Yohane’s Soul, the sea of Stewshine comes with its own sea monster and complimentary rocks, and the piano keys on the bridge are a tribute to the many, many hours spent idly improvising fragments of melodies while daydreaming about smouldering older GL manga love interests.

And because it has to be pretty and delicious, here are pictures of the Stewshine on its own and the castle’s cross-section. It’s a Pâté En Croute, a kind of cold meat pie that is usually Not Vertical.

Now, for the process and contents! The Pâté is filled with an assortment of meats, as well as poultry livers and shiitake mushrooms, marinated in Madeira wine, herbs and spices (and for the livers, lemon juice). To make the dough black (I couldn’t NOT make it black), I used both black sesame seed paste and squid ink for a double shot of DARKNESS.

The real challenge was finding a mould that would work: Pâté en Croute is usually long, rectangular and horizontal, so of course I couldn’t find one that would work vertically, especially not one specifically made for this purpose, and I wanted it to cook vertically so it wouldn’t collapse on one side, and so I could make battlements. So I stacked a bunch of tart circles on top of each other, baked supports of salt dough around them to keep them in place, and then held the whole thing together with some string while baking. It was an experience, but hey, it worked, and the battlements baked perfectly without breaking! The last step was pouring Madeira jelly through the vent to make sure there are no gaps inside, but in the end I had pressed the meat down so well that I barely needed any at all. So before serving, I also glazed the whole thing with the rest of the jelly, to make it extra SHINY.

Now, unlike Mari Fricking Ohara, I unfortunately can’t afford to spend 100k yen on ingredients, so I had to do with something a little more reasonable for my stewshine, but I opted for a some fun ones to make up for it. The soup base is fish soup stock, in which I simmered some haddock, shrimp, mussels, shiitake mushrooms, a dash of squid ink, and added some PURPLE POTATOES because it’s Mari.

The sea monster and the top of the bridge are made of homemade kamaboko (japanese fishcake) made with the rest of the haddock. I made it a little denser than normal so I’d be able to shape it before steaming. The structure of the bridge is made from leftover dough, and the piano key pattern is painted on with more squid ink. I cut some of the potatoes into the shape of rocks and steamed them before placing them around the castle base, and used some slices as base to hold the sea monster parts.

And after all that work, it was time to finally enjoy!

(Unfortunately the picture is blurry but I only found out when posting this, and, well, unfortunately, we already ate it all. Oops)

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this GUILTY HOLIDAY full of Guilty Kiss energy!