My first Macrobiotic Cake

One morning, I heard the doorbell, so I answered. It was Post office staff and she informed me of the arrival of a packet from Japan.
It was a gift from my friend and I was asked to pay around 30 euros to recieve it! What??? It was a GIFT! But she explained that the regulation had changed some years ago and now we had to pay the tax even it was a gift. Moreover, I had to pay the exact amount, fortunately my neighbors could change money and I could. (If we do not have the exact amount, we have to go back to the post office!)

As I was so unhappy, I started checking on the internet and then I found the info with NEW!!! mark in Correos(Post office) HP. According this, even gifts are subjected to a custom duty, if they are from outside EU and have value of more than 45 euros. Shock...
Is there any other countries where we should pay to receive a gift???
Spain is suffering from budget deficit and the goverment want to exploit our small salary, but maybe they don't need to do something small like a gift???
If your family or your friends are planning to send something to you in Spain, please be carefull in order to avoid any surprise!

Well, sorry for lengthy preamble, today I tried to make Macrobiotic Cake, which I had been interested in. As you may know, we can use only vegetable material for Macrobiotic food, and I was wondering if cakes without eggs would be nice or not and some materials were difficult to get. But finally I got a recipe book and all ingredients, including TOFU from Tofu-ya in Barcelona, so now only what I should do was to move into action!

As Spring had arrived, thinking about detox, I decided to make Matcha Strawberry Cake, filled with lots of Vitamin C ♪

Sponge.

Decorated with TOFU cream and strawberries.

Finish!

Inside.

I felt that TOFU cream had quite TOFU taste, but the cake was recieved well by my friends who agreed to be guinea pig (conejillo de Indias in Spanish).

This time I made them accorging to the recipe book, so I just explaine the ingredients I used.

Sponge： Wheat flour, whole-wheat, baking powder, salt, sesami oil, maple syrop, soy milk, vanilla essence, matcha
TOFU cream： Momen tofu, soy milk, apple juice, rice syrop, maple syrop, kanten, kuzu powder, vanilla essence

In the future, I will create my own recipe and introduce.

Bon profit!!!