Sakura sweets lineup also includes mouth-watering cherry blossom cake with two sakura-sourced ingredients.
Spring is truly a magical time in Japan. After months of biting cold and long nights, nothing lifts your spirits like seeing bursts of beautiful pastel pink suddenly appear across the whole country in the form of cherry blossom…desserts.
Sure, the actual sakura flowers are pretty nice, but if you’re the type that prefers your seasonal wonders to be of the edible variety, the real appeal of the season is the way Japanese cafes add a flurry of sakura desserts, which combine sweet and salty tastes, to their menus. To that end, Starbucks has two new menu items that are sure to make your day (or days, if you’re sensible enough to resist the urge to eat them both in one sitting).
Up first is the Sakura Donut, a tempting combination of Eastern and Western confectionery skill which takes a thick cake donut and adds a sakura-colored glaze dusted with salted cherry blossom petal powder.
For those wanting even more sakura-sourced ingredients, there’s the Sakura Chiffon Cake, which mixes the leaves of the cherry blossom tree into the flour used to make the dessert. Each slice also comes topped with a salted cherry blossom, providing a splash of color on the field of creamy frosting on which it sits.
The sakura donut is priced at 250 yen (US$2.30), while the sakura chiffon cake is slightly more upmarket at 380 yen for a slice, though both remain such affordable luxuries that pairing them with one of Starbucks’ new Sakura Strawberry Pink Mochi Frappuccinos won’t bust your budget. And best of all, even though we’ve got a few weeks to go until the actual cherry blossoms start to bloom, both of these sakura desserts are available right now.
Source: Starbucks (1, 2) via Entabe
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Starbucks (1, 2)
Follow Casey on Twitter, where he wonders if the old “hana yori dango” saying still applies if said dango are sakura-flavored.