Vegan sweets in November

When I have time on weekends, I often stroll around the basement of Entetsu Department Store near JR Hamamatsu Station. Like other department stores in Japan, it has a large food section in the basement. The basement of the new building, which is the northern part of the department store, consists mainly of confectionary stores. Even if you are a vegan, you can try many Japanese sweets made in traditional ways without dairy products and eggs. They are also suitable for those who have allergies to these ingredients.

Japanese-style confectionary stores make different sweets according to the seasons. In addition to basic ingredients such as rice flour, wheat flour, adzuki beans, sugar, etc., they often use season’s fruits or some other plant-based ingredients. Now they have many kinds of chestnut sweets. One of the most popular sweets looks like this.

It is called kurikinton and made of mashed chestnuts and sugar originally. It isn’t too sweet, and you can enjoy the original taste of the chestnuts. In Central Japan, Gifu Prefecture is famous for its kurikinton. It is a mountainous prefecture, and they cultivate chestnuts of high quality.

In addition to such simple but tasty sweets, there are also sweets like this that please the eye.

You see something orange among the beans? It isn't a starfish but an autumn leaf. Last summer, I saw a similar kind of sweets with an orange goldfish instead of a leaf. In such a way, they change the motif with the seasons. I like to explore in the confectionary section partly because I enjoy seeing new design of sweets. I’ll report what I have found at the beginning of each month.

In Japanese traditional jelly-like sweets like above, agar is used usually instead of gelatin. They are vegan-friendly also in this respect. In the confectionary section, I also found boxes filled with agar autumn leaves. They are from Kyoto, the home of traditional elegant sweets.