Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.
sweets (Page 106)
Kids’ hopes and dreams for the future can change from one minute to the next and very often depend on the TV shows they watch and whatever their friends are talking about on any given week. But a recent survey conducted by human resource consulting company Adecco has revealed some interesting information about the future aspirations of children from Japan compared to those of kids from other eight other Asian countries.
Among the many kinds of tasty sweets indigenous to Japan, you’ll find the monaka. Monaka consist of two wafers, traditionally sandwiched around a dollop of the sweet red bean paste called anko.
Different confectioners put their own unique spin on monaka, such as infusing it with citrus or mixing ice cream in the filling. But while we’ve eaten plenty of variations on the tasty treat, our intrepid reporter Mr. Sato recently brought back one we’d never heard of before: suicide monaka.
Growing up in Southern California, I was no stranger to long road trips, whether up the coast to visit relatives, or out to Las Vegas to visit the craps tables. Along the way I’d pass many freeway rest areas, with amenities whose quality ranged from “a good place to use the bathroom as long as you cover your nose” to “a good place to use the bathroom, as long as you have a friend with you to make sure you don’t get shanked by a hobo.”
So imagine my surprise when I moved to Japan to find that its highway rest stops (called “parking areas” by Japanese motorists) are spotless. Plus, they’re often great spots to munch on regional specialties or pick up local souvenirs. And if you happen to visit one particular parking area, you can even go back in time.
It’s no secret that here at RocketNews24, we’re fond of anything cute and sweet, and we’ve certainly introduced our share of adorable-looking treats on our site, from totoro cream puffs and macaroons to marshmallow cat paws. Well, continuing in that spirit, we bring to you another delightful creation that looks too precious to eat! This time it’s a home-cooked snack that basically involves making pancakes, but the end result is still devastatingly cute!
With less than a month to go until Valentine’s Day, Japan has got sweets on the brain. Japanese tradition dictates that, on the special day, women give gifts to men, including at least one form of chocolate.
But while common opinion holds that homemade chocolate is best, not everyone has the culinary skills or free time to whip up a batch. So for those of you looking for the next best thing, we bring you our taste test of Krispy Kreme Japan’s three limited edition Valentine’s Day flavors.
It’s been a little more than a year since we reported on ttongsul, or Korean feces wine. And while many of our readers enjoyed sampling the beverage vicariously through the five victims brave young ladies we recruited for the taste test, others took us to task for not having our regular staff knock back a glass of dookie-liqueur.
In an attempt at penance, we traveled to Korea to snack on poo-shaped cakes.
Recently, Meg, one of our RocketNews24 colleagues from our Japanese-language sister site, came to us raving about a great dessert she’d just tried. Since we’re always thinking about food, we were happy to listen as she gushed. “It’s called yakigori,” she informed us, “and people have been making it in Japan for over 100 years!”
“Oh, you mean, kakigori, right?” we responded, mentioning the Japanese word for shaved ice. “Yeah, we have that overseas, too. By the way, you should really take some medicine for that cold.”
“No, not kakigori, yakigori,” Meg insisted. To help us understand, she even wrote it down in Japanese. We read the kanji characters, 焼き氷, once, then double checked it. There was no mistake, though. Meg was talking about a dessert named “roasted ice.”
Always keen to cash in and come up with some new character-themed promotions, Japan’s 7-Eleven recently began selling blueberry and whipped cream-filled bread made to look like none other than Gomu Gomu no Mi Devil Fruit from the One Piece manga and anime.
We couldn’t resist finding out what the fruit that made Monkey D. Luffy the man he is tastes like, so when we spotted the new sweet bread at our local combini we grabbed one right away. Join us after the jump for our full taste test.
As one of Japan’s northernmost prefectures, the majority of regional delicacies in Akita are things to warm the body up. For example, Akita’s most famous dish is kiritampo, a hot-pot with chicken, vegetables, and unique cylindrical rice cakes. In recent years the prefecture’s inaniwa udon noodles, thinner than those common in other parts of Japan, have also been steadily gaining fans, as well.
But while there’s nothing wrong with some piping hot chow to fortify yourself with on a snowy night, what about dessert? Sure, you could make do with a plain old pack of cookies from the convenience store, but if you want to satisfy your sweet tooth like the locals do in Akita, you need to get your hands on the pastry known as milk yaki.
Despite its pronunciation in Japanese coming out unnervingly close to “shoe cream,” choux crème does not, in fact, refer to a product to keep your wingtips looking their shiniest. More commonly known in North America as cream puffs, choux crème are one of the many non-indigenous desserts popular in Japan.
In similarly confusing fashion, the popular chain Beard Papa sells neither razors, lawnmowers, easy chairs, nor any of the other trappings assorted with fatherhood and/or having facial hair. Beard Papa is instead Japan’s most prolific choux crème bakery, and for the next two months they’re bringing back their popular melon bread-inspired cream puffs.
Japan is wild about dessert cafes and pastry shops. From donuts to pretzels to cakes, the nation’s sweet-tooth knows no bounds, and you’ll find baked sugary treats almost anywhere in the city. “So what makes this new store special?” you ask. Well, it’s not your typical sweet shop, but in fact an all-you-can-eat cookie buffet!
This Wednesday, a new location for the popular dessert chain Aunt Stella’s Cookies opened up in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro. And Aunt Stella has cooked up a bunch of tasty specials to celebrate the move!
While Tokyo remains Japan’s largest and most internationally well-known metropolis, the city of Osaka is no slouch either. Osaka is known for its simple, tasty grub, such as takoyaki octopus dumplings and kushiage, basically deep-fried anything on a stick.
Osaka is also building a pantheon of cute, animal-shaped sweets, such as the platypus pastry which was on sale there until the end of last August. For autumn, there’s a new adorable dessert in town: this bathing bear made out of ice cream.
Given the massive popularity of virtual idol Hatsune Miku, it’s easy to forget that she really hasn’t been around that long. The singing computer construct only recently celebrated her sixth birthday, which inspired one fan to whip up a Miku-themed cake.
This is far from the first time we’ve come across food that’s supposed to resemble the aqua-tressed songstress, and we’ve previously reported on Miku meat buns and even Miku bento. This just might be the most detailed recreation we’ve seen of the Vocaloid in edible form yet, though.
As part of our quest to get paid for eating as many desserts as possible, we recently shared our impressions of the Suica Penguin cake, modeled after the popular mascot for JR East’s prepaid IC card train pass system, Suica.
But sometimes loveable mass transit mascots are like hardcore gangster rappers, and it turns out the Suica Penguin has a cross-country rival, in the form of Ico-chan, the spokes-platypus for JR West’s ICOCA train pass system. Not wanting to be shown up by the Suica Penguin’s foray into the world of cake, the only thing for Ico-chan to do was to transform himself into a tasty treat, too.
Has Hello Kitty finally buckled to hipster fashion trends? Has she been tapped to replace the aging Harrison Ford in an upcoming new Indiana Jones movie, under the logic that if the franchise can include aliens, why not anthropomorphic cats, too? Or has she simply decided to make a living as a hard-boiled private eye?
That third theory actually isn’t so far off the mark, but as with any good mystery, the real culprit behind Kitty-chan’s throwback headgear is someone, or in this case something, you’d never expect: custard pudding.
You may recall we reported a while ago on JR East’s Suica penguin mascot character being turned into a totally yummy-licious looking cream-filled bread. Now, Suica Penguin, as the mascot is known, has become a beautiful cake that’s attracted a fair bit of attention on the Japanese Internet recently. Of course, we couldn’t ignore such buzz involving a confection that’s bound to look adorable as well as taste delectably sweet, so we sent one of our reporters off on a mission to try the penguin cake everyone seemed to be talking about and provide our readers with a first-hand account. So, was the cake as cute and tasty as we expected?
I used to have a co-worker who, on the hottest of summer days, would drink a pint of hot water through a straw and claim it helped cool her down. Naturally, everyone thought she was insane or belonged to some weird religion, or both, and would try to avoid working a shift alone with her.
But it looks like her weird sect of Scientology or whatever it was may have been onto something, as our Japanese reporter swears by eating microwaved steam buns to cool off in the summer.
Among the extensive pantheon of ramen varieties is tsukemen, in which the noodles are served on a dish with a bowl of dipping sauce on the side. My first experience with the dish was in college, when a buddy took me to a tsukemen place that had opened up near our campus in Tokyo that was famous for their sauce made with fish stock. At the time it seemed like a wildly exotic concoction, but little did I know that years later my hometown of Los Angeles would produce an even more outlandish version of the dish: marshmallow ramen.
So here’s a tricky question: do desserts count as masculine or feminine food? On the one hand, a slice of chocolate cake is just as bold a statement of your culinary decadence as a nice fried pork cutlet. In either case, it’s at least a little wild and macho to eat something with such shaky nutritional value yet unquestionable deliciousness, similar to how I rationalize eating a pack of ham out of the fridge when I’m too lazy to go buy bread for a sandwich as being a natural result of my raging testosterone.
On the other hand, sweets are, well, sweet. Truly red-blooded males can’t even bring themselves to utter the word “sweet” unless they add “taste of revenge” after it while clenching a fist and glaring at the horizon.
Thankfully, Japanese convenience store chain Family Mart is here to help end this confusion with a line of desserts tailor-made for everybody born with a Y chromosome.
In almost every company in Japan, payday is on the 25th of the month. While this means every month feels a little like Christmas, it also means that if you’ve been partying a little too hard for the last 30-odd days, around the 22nd, your bank balance might be looking pretty dismal.
But no matter how much you try to cut back, man can’t live on bread alone. Looking to treat yourself to the most meager luxury possible, you might stumble into a branch of the Japanese convenience store Lawson, where there’s a special treat to brighten your day that’s available only on the 22nd of each month. Read More
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