Vegan sweets in August

Today is Sunday, and I have just returned home from the downtown. The temperature is over 30 degrees outside. At this time of year, it may be much more refreshing to eat fruits than sweets, however, I still like to eat some agar jelly. In Entetsu Department Store, I found several kinds of agar jelly with beautiful design for summer, such as gold fishes in water, but I was not sure if they were vegan. They contained a gelling agent, which can be an animal product. In the shop of Kano Shojuan (叶匠寿庵), I could find vegan jelly at last. It was Hakuto (white peach) Mitsumame.

Mitsumame is a common dessert found in cafés that serve Japanese sweets. It usually consists of small cubes of agar jelly (usually not colored), red peas, and syrup. I heard the red peas are used to give an accent to mitsumame. They are boiled but a little hard.

This Hakuto Mitsumame had jelly cubes colored with food colors (carotenoid, copper chlorophyll) and a slice of peach. It was beautiful to see and refreshing to eat. The syrup was sweet and had the flavor of peach blending into it. According to some websites, this product seems to be popular as a summer gift.

In another shop Ryoguchiya Korekiyo (両口屋是清) in the department store, I found a cute sweet imitating a watermelon. It’s a kind of kingyokukan, a sweet made from agar, sugar, starch syrup, etc. This product also contained, watermelon, white and red kidney beans, adzuki beans, concentrated juice of melon, etc.

The adzuki beans were used to represent seeds of a watermelon. The top of the sweet has stripes, resembling the skin of the fruit. It was elaborately made. I could feel the distinctive taste of a watermelon, though it seemed to contain much bean paste as well. This “Watermelon” is one of the products of a series called “Sasaragata.” There are also kingyokukan with flavors of pineapple, white peach, and lemon. I wonder how other products taste. Ryoguchiya Korekiyo is an old confectionary shop founded in 1634, but this series is very modern and cute.