Lotte Custard Cake

Japan has an entire supermarket aisle that barely exists elsewhere: soft cakes that keep at room temperature for months.

Not dry biscuits, not refrigerated pastries — actual moist sponge, individually sealed, sitting on a shelf next to the crackers.

Lotte Custard Cake is one of the fixtures of that aisle, and the engineering behind it is real.

Sorbitol and glycerin hold moisture in the crumb, so the cake that comes out of the wrapper weeks after it was baked is still pillowy rather than stale.

Inside each one is custard, which in Japan is less a filling than a national preoccupation.

Custard fills the choux buns at every bakery, the taiyaki at festival stalls, the pudding cups in every convenience store, and it is understood here as a gentle, milky, egg-forward sweetness rather than a rich vanilla cream.

Lotte’s version follows that reading.

Liquid egg is the first ingredient on the list, whole milk powder and whey run through the filling, and a small measure of Western liquor sits underneath, adding the faintly boozy aromatic lift that Japanese confectioners use to round out egg flavors.

Each Custard Cake is 27 g, roughly two bites, and noticeably light for its size.

One thing worth knowing: the packaging suggests an alternative.

Warm a Custard Cake briefly in a toaster oven and the outside firms into something closer to a baked custard tart while the centre goes molten.

Japanese fans treat this as the correct way to eat it in winter. Straight from the wrapper it is a soft, mild, unchallenging thing to have with coffee — which, after fifty years on the shelf, is clearly the point.

About this item
Item Name : Custard Cake
Brand : Lotte
Item Form : Cake
Number of Items : 6 Counts (Box of 1)