Chilled Amazake Cracked Ice is a cool treat you can make even with zero cooking skills.

Here at SoraNews24, we’ve firmly established our position that dessert is to be enjoyed year-round. For the summertime, that means cool, refreshing sweet treats, but there’s another problem. If it’s hot enough that we want a cold dessert, it’s also hot enough that we’re probably feeling too lazy to do very much work in the kitchen.

Coming to our rescue is Japanese confectionary company Morinaga, with a super-easy dessert recipe with amazake as the key ingredient. Amazake literally means “sweet sake,” and like Japan’s representative rice wine, it’s a drink made from fermented rice. Amazake isn’t alcoholic, though, so it can be enjoyed by both young and old as a mildly sweet beverage…or you can use it to make Chilled Amazake Cracked Ice, as Morinaga suggests.

Ingredients:
● Amazake: 1/2 can (roughly 95 grams [3.4 ounces])
● Yogurt: 50 grams (1.8 ounces)
● Unflavored gelatin powder: 5 grams (0.2 ounces)
● Hot water: 3 tablespoons
● Fruits, berries, and nuts of your choice

Obviously, as long as you keep the ratios the same, you can expand the recipe as much as you want, so we upsized it a bit for our batch, since we can’t remember the last time we thought to ourselves “We have too many desserts.”

Step 1: Combine the gelatin and water in a bowl. Technically, you can make the Chilled Amazake Cracked Ice without gelatin, but including it will help with the final product’s consistency and help keep it from melting too quickly.

Step 2: In a separate bowl combine the amazake and yogurt, mixing them together.

▼ Gelatin and water (left) and amazake and yogurt (right)

Step 3: Once the amazake and yogurt are mixed together, add the gelatin to the mixture, then pour it all into a baking tray to a depth of about 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) thick.

Step 4: Place whatever fruits and nut you like in the pan. We used kiwis, cashews, and a whole bunch of berries, which we arranged artfully. Perhaps a little too artfully, as we’ll soon see.

▼ It did make for a very nice photo, though.

Step 5: Place the pan in the freezer to chill. This takes a few hours, and when we pulled the pan back out…

…we discovered that the positions of the fruits and nuts had shifted during the dessert’s hardening!

Step 6: However, this turned out to be not such a big problem. Remember, this recipe is for Chilled Amazake Cracked Ice, so you’re suppose to snap or cut pieces off for individual servings, and once we did that, our frozen dessert was looking lovely once again.

But while “easy” and “pretty” are definitely nice bonus attributes, the most important thing for a dessert is how it tastes, and thankfully the Chilled Amazake Cracked Ice doesn’t disappoint on that front either. The chill of the frozen amazake/yogurt mixture, combined with its both sweet and tart flavor, had us feeling cool and refreshed from the very first bite, with extra bursts of flavor coming in as we hit pockets of fruit, while the salt of the nuts gave the aftertaste a clean finish.

So in the end, this is a unique, stylish, and simple dessert that’s equally suited for summertime get-togethers or just keeping a pan of in your freezer at all times over the next few months, especially if you’re not a fan of Japan’s seasonal rush of mint chocolate sweets.

Reference: Morinaga
Photos © SoraNews24
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he IS a fan of Japan’s seasonal rush of mint chocolate sweets.

[ Read in Japanese ]