Last month I introduced sakuramochi in Kansai style. Here in Hamamatsu, it is more prevailing than the one in Kanto style, and you can find it not only in Japanese-style confectionary stores but also in supermarkets and convenience stores. In fact, I had never eaten sakuramochi in Kanto style before because it is rather uncommon. However, I finally bought one in Shunkado (春華堂), one of the best-known confectionary stores in Hamamatsu. Their specialty is unagi (eel) pie, but they also make traditional Japanese sweets.
As with sakuramochi in Kansai style, this one was wrapped with a salted cherry leaf. Its scent was noticeable even before I opened the package. It was stuffed with adzuki bean paste, which was also the same as the one in Kansai style. The difference was that this sakuramochi was made from wheat flour, mixture of glutinous rice, starch, and salt, etc. while the other was made from rice flour. It looked like a pink crepe, but it was more elastic because of the mixture of different kinds of flour. It had an interesting texture. I thought the flavors of the cherry leaf and adzuki paste were not very different from those of the one in Kansai style. This sakuramochi was also good, but personally, I prefer the one in Kansai style.
In addition to cherry-related sweets, I found very springlike sweets in the basement of Entetsu Department Store. In the main building, there is a section “Enshu Gourmet” where foods produced in Enshu or eastern Shizuoka Prefecture are sold. Yesterday, I bought two sweets from Tamachi Baigetsu (田町梅月) . One of them was “Butterfly.”
This was a kind of sweet called nerikiri. It looked like marzipan but was made from sugar, white kidney beans, adzuki bean, yam, malt syrup, glutinous rice flour, agar, and gardenia for coloring. I have seldom seen an insect-shaped sweet like this, but it was pretty. When I tasted it, I regretted not having prepared tea because it was so sweet! It was surely supposed to be eaten with green tea.
The other one was “Dandelion” which was made from almost the same ingredients as “Butterfly”, but it didn’t contain yam. The flower and the leaves of the dandelion were made finely. This kind of sweet is called kanoko and consists of a ball of bean paste covered with azduki beans.
As I expected, it was also very sweet. But this time, I had green tea that I bought at JR Hamamatsu Station.
I have two kinds of Japanese tea at home. One is hojicha or roasted green tea, and the other is genmaicha or green tea with roasted brown rice. With “Dandelion”, I drank genmaicha, but it didn’t match the sweet! Genmaicha is tasty tea in itself with the flavor of rice, however, it wasn’t bitter enough to mitigate the sweetness! Ordinary green tea or black coffee may have been the best drink for it.
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