Well here’s a crazy dish inspired by Shokugeki no Soma (also known as Food Wars!). If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a Japanese anime all about food and crazy cooking battles called shokugekis. Think Iron Chef on steroids, set in a school where everything – your grades, your friends, your livelihood – is based on how well you cook. Typical of animes, there’s all sorts of eccentric characters in the show, from a spice master who has absolute control over the sense of smell, to a guy who can flawlessly copy any dish using his pure power of mimicry, to a girl with the ‘God Tongue’ who can identify any miniscule errors in cooking by taste alone.

It’s a crazy show to say the list, but the best bits to me are the dishes they come up with.

There are alchemical dishes like the ‘Transforming Furikake Gohan’, a take on a simple Japanese dish of seaweed-seasoned rice, with the genius addition of barely-set cubes of jellied chicken dashi broth that melt as you mix them through the rice. There are dishes that subverts expectations, like a breakfast-themed risotto with apples and bacon. And then there are crazy cross-cultural behemoths like ‘French Curry Lobster Rice with Cognac’ and ‘Naan Pot Pie Curry’. For the latter, think chicken pot pie, but instead of a typical creamy roux-based chicken, there’s Singaporean fish head curry, and instead of pie dough, it uses naan as the pie wrapping. How novel!

Before you think these dishes are all just flights of fancy that can’t ever be replicated in real-life, the show is surprisingly on point with their culinary techniques and terms. Plus there’s a whole Wiki site with actual, workable recipes for dishes made in the show! I’ve even had to look up some of the techniques and ingredients mentioned in the show, and they’re all legit! I’ve learnt things like how the damask rose was a super fragrant used used in many Renaissance desserts, to the best ways of cooking bear meat (not that I ever will), to how using first, second, and third buckwheat flour affects the taste of soba.

Suffice to say, I do draw lotsa inspiration from the show. I particularly fancy the dishes made by the protagonist, Yukihira Soma, who bases a lot of his cooking on his humble Japanese diner upbringing – think rice bowls and bento boxes – but with weird, inventive twists like making noodles from barley, combining cheese and gyoza, and making ridiculous-sounding dishes like ‘Time Fuse Mapo Curry Noodles’ and ‘Roast Pork, Just Kidding’.

So in the spirit of the Soma’s style of glamming up classic dishes, I took a classic dish of my Malaysian childhood – bingka ubi (a baked tapioca cake) – and upgraded it to shokugeki-winning material. I started off with a regular bingka ubi recipe, but instead of having it all rectangular, I baked it in a pan, giving it the shape of a tart of sorts. But for the real twist, I hid a layer of creamy, caramelised dulce de leche inside the cake, giving it that hidden-explosion-of-flavour that’s characteristic of so many battle-winning dishes.

“おそまつ!” (“It wasn’t much!”) — Yukihira Soma