Dessert with hojicha agar jelly

Today is my sister’s birthday. Since she isn’t particularly fond of sweets, she may prefer celebrating her birthday with sake and potato chips. Come to think of it, both are vegan, though she is neither vegan nor vegetarian. Even when it is your birthday, maybe you don’t have to stick to a cake if you don’t like it or can’t eat it for some reasons. I think I'll have a Japanese sweet on my next birthday instead of looking for a vegan cake.

In the evening, I found a gorgeous dessert at a supermarket Seijo Ishii. It reminded me of the dessert in the Singapore Fair I tried at the beginning of August, but it consisted of Japanese sweets. Its name was long: Hojicha agar jelly anmitsu with home-made yomogimochi and warabiochi. Anmitsu is a dessert with cubes of agar jelly, adzuki bean paste, boiled peas, and fruits.

The toppings looked like this. They are a grazed apricot, warabimochi made from tapioca and bracken starch, two yomogimochi (kusamochi) made from glutinous rice flour and mugwort, smooth azduki bean paste, and kanoko beans.

Under the inner plastic case with the toppings, there were hojicha agar jelly with a pack of brown sugar syrup.

I poured the sauce over the jelly and put the toppings on it. The jelly could be hardly seen.

I couldn’t dare to mix the toppings with the jelly, so I ate them one by one. The apricot was a bit sour, and I thought it was a right choice to eat it first, because other toppings were much sweeter. Warabimochi with soybean powder on it was stuffed with adzuki bean paste, but yomogimochi wasn’t. So, I ate yomogimochi with smooth adzuki bean paste. Though they were small, I could feel the distinctive flavor of mugwort. Both warabimochi and yomogimochi were soft and good. Kanoko beans, which I wasn’t familiar with, were boiled sweet beans.

The toppings were gorgeous, but for me, the most interesting part of the dessert was hojicha agar jelly. Hojicha is roasted green tea, and I like it very much. The jelly looked like smoky coffee jelly and was bitter like coffee jelly. But I regretted to have poured the syrup before I tasted the jelly without it. Since the syrup had a unique sweet flavor, I couldn’t taste its original taste sufficiently. However, their combination wasn’t bad.

As I have tea leaves of hojicha at home, I may be able to make hojicha agar jelly by myself. How about eating it with yuzu marmalade instead of black sugar syrup? Russian people add jam to their tea. So, it may also taste good.