This Friday Food fell serendipitously on 8/18 which as most K-Pop fans know, is G-Dragon’s birthday! So while I was thinking of what food to write about this week, naturally I thought about what birthday recipes are used in Korea. As I’ve covered in other Friday Food articles, there isn’t a very wide selection of desserts to write about, especially for birthdays! (When the most common birthday food in Korea is soup.)
There isn’t a “birthday cake” per-say, that everybody uses like they do in other cultures, but there is one cake recipe that gets used a lot more than others and is pretty recognizable as the birthday cake of Korea. I actually had to hunt down the name of the cake itself when, off the top of my head, all I could think of was “that one cake with the whipped cream and tons of fruit on top that you see idols get on their birthdays.”
생크림 케이크 (Saeng — fresh, Cream Cake) is a light and delicious cake that I personally am going to try making very soon. Strawberry is the most common topping, but you’ll often see it with kiwi and blueberries. You’ll see pretty much any fruit be used as a topping or main ingredient in Korean sweets.
Here’s a video on how to make it yourself:
Bonus picture! Just to see if my theory was correct, I Googled a bunch of different Korean celebrities with “____ birthday cake” and no doubt, one of the first (if not the first) picture(s) was of them with a Saeng Cream Cake!
Here’s the result of my Google search for G-Dragon! It was the very first picture on Google and it’s from a couple years ago:
What do you guys think of the Saeng Cream Cake? Have you ever tried it? Or do you plan on making it yourself?
Let us know in the comments below or on our UKP Facebook or Twitter!
PS: 생일 축하합니다 권지용!
