Baking has taken over our social feeds and our kitchens in recent months, but you can outsource the time and effort required for pastry-cheffing by ordering a freshly baked Japanese cheesecake to your door from new Sydney business, 15 Centimeters.
It’ll cost you $36 for the classic vanilla, or $38 for matcha, chocolate or Tahitian lime, and they require two days' notice to ensure your cake is ‘yakitate’, meaning 'freshly baked' to order.
15 Centimeters (named for the size of the cake tin they use) was created around the kitchen table of Kei Tokiwa, his girlfriend Naoka Kojo and their flatmate Caddie Mao. Before the shutdown hit, Tokiwa worked at Chaco Bar in Potts Point where they had been selling Japanese cheesecakes based on a recipe from Kojo. She had served the cake at a housewarming and the head chef of the restaurant had fallen in love with the dessert. With restaurants in trading limbo, Kojo and Mao decided to start a home delivery service providing those same cheesecakes to order.
“We love Japanese dessert textures,” explain Tokiwa, “they are very smooth and tend to be rich." Unlike a New York or Hungarian-style cheesecakes, both the Japanese and Basque iterations don’t have a biscuit base. The 15 Centimeter cakes are based on a French-style cream cheese, eggs, sugar, cream, and vanilla, which are whipped together and baked slowly to ensure it retains the soft, slightly runny texture at the very centre of the cake. They then finish the cakes at high heat to get the perfect bronze crust typical of the Basque-style cakes.
The chocolate variety uses 54.5 per cent Belgian chococlate and the result is akin to a mousse cake, and to balance the sweet richness of the cake you could go for wither the bright tang of fresh zest and juice in the Tahitian lime, or the smoky roastiness of Japanese matcha.
Photograph: Supplied
Currently, they’re making around 100 cakes a week and delivering across Sydney, or you can order their one-off flavours as part of Chase Kojima’s sushi pop-up at Tramsheds. Kojima, of Sokyo fame, started Simulation Senpai to help give work to hospitality staff affected by the lockdowns. They make beautiful sushi and sashimi boxes that you can pre-order for Fridays and Saturdays, and 15 Centimeters are providing limited edition cheesecakes to the mix every fortnight.
Hungry for more top Japanese cuisine? Slurp your way through the best ramen in Sydney.
