Chocoholic: Japanese Sweet Snacks
After covering Indonesian snacks and Chinese mooncakes, now let’s go to Japan to try some characteristically Japanese sweet snacks, many of which can be found in Japanese supermarkets in the United States.
1. Mitarashi dango
Skewered balls made of glutinous rice flour and served with a sweet soy sauce glaze.
2. Dorayaki
Imagine two small pancakes sandwiching sweet red bean paste filling (anko). This snack is popularized by the popular children’s animated series Doraemon.
3. Taiyaki
Fish-shaped snack with red bean paste filling.
4. Daifuku
Small, round mochi usually filled with sweet red bean paste.
5. Manju
Also small, round, and filled with sweet red bean paste, but the shell is not glutinous.
6. Imagawayaki
Similar to dorayaki in concept, but unlike dorayaki, the two parts are cooked together to allow them to glue and become one continuous unit.
7. Sakuramochi
Pink-colored rice cake filled with, you guessed it, sweet red bean paste and wrapped with Japanese cherry blossom leaf.
8. Anmitsu
Small cubes of agar jelly, mixed fruits, sweet red bean paste, boiled peas, and ice cream in a bowl. Perfect for summer.
9. Melon pan
Melon pan is bread with a cookie layer on top that has a criss-cross pattern to which the melon part of the name refers. A fresh melon pan would have crunchiness from the cookie layer, but most melon pan sold in stores already lose this freshness. This bread usually has no filling.
10. Castella
Basically a sweet sponge cake. A specialty of Nagasaki prefecture, but supposedly was brought to Japan by Portuguese merchants.
-Tina Kartika