Vegan sweets in July

In Europe, they have a very hot summer this year. Here in Hamamatsu, the temperature is still less than 30 ℃, however, it’s humid and uncomfortable sometimes. Confectionary stores are selling cool sweets with jelly and summer fruits. In Japanese-style confectionary stores, jelly is usually made from agar. In Entetsu Department Store, there is a temporary shop of Taneya (たねや) from Shiga Prefecture until August 20. They have three kinds of agar jelly: with adzuki beans, summer orange, and dark molasses & roasted soybean flour. They all looked delicious.

I bought the one with summer orange sauce. The package looked like this. It contained agar jelly, sauce, and description about how to prepare the dessert.

The jelly consisted of seven pieces. First, I drew out the divider from the plastic case to put the pieces to the bowl one by one.

Then I poured the sauce over the jelly.

The sweet and sour sauce was good as it was. But I didn’t think it went well with agar jelly and couldn’t help thinking it might be better with dark molasses & roasted soybean flour. It may be because I haven’t got used to such a combination.

In Entetsu Department Store, I didn’t buy any other sweets this time. I didn’t know exactly what kinds of sweets were typical in July. Later, I found an interesting combination of sweets sold together at a reasonable price. Both of them are sasamochi. Sasa means a bamboo leaf, and mochi a rice cake (in this case, it means a soft elastic sweet resembling a rice cake).

The left one is called kuzunomochi. It is simply made from adzuki beans, sugar, and arrowroot starch. It is very much like mizumanju I introduced in “Vegan sweets in June.” The difference was that kuzunomochi was wrapped with a bamboo leaf, and it contained more adzuki bean paste inside. The fragrance of the fresh bamboo leaf was noticeable already when I opened the package, which gave an additional flavor to kuzunomochi.

The right one is hunomochi. Immediately before opening the pack, I noticed it was not vegan. The ingredients were as follows: adzuki beans, sugar, glutinous rice flour, wheat gluten, emulsifier (milk is contained in some ingredient). I have seen the same kind of sweet in some other stores. It was also called “humanju”, and basically made from wheat gluten (hu), sugar, and adzuki bean paste, I suppose. I wonder if it usually contains milk or not, but it seems to be one of the typical sweet sold at this time of year. The wheat flour skin of this hunomochi was so stretchy that it reminded me of chewing gum and a rice cake. If you are not a vegan, it’s worth tasting.