If you have been reading my blog for a year, you will know that I ADORE cherry (sakura) flavored foods. It is a little misleading to say 'cherry' because people think of the small red fruits, so let me use the Japanese word 'sakura'.Sakura blossom sweets and tea are nice but sweets wrapped in salt pickled sakura leaves are my favorite. I can happily just eat the leaves! I found packets of pickled leaves on a 20% off sale at Seibu's Jiyugaoka Garden supermarket so I bought 3 packets. Sakura sweets are only supposed to be eaten in early spring but I don't care. I am greedily saving up the leaves to enjoy for the next half year - the expiry date on the packs say November 2007.
Today I used the leaves for the first time. I made muffins flavored with 3 chopped sakura leaves and one small can of sweet red beans. I chose a brand of beans that didn't contain much sugar or syrup, so the muffins are more savory than sweet. (No added sugar.) The sakura fragrance when I took them out of the oven was so wonderful! Next I will try kanten jelly and maybe a pound cake (not so healthy ....)
By the way, the sweets shop Ginza Bunmeido makes really nice sakura manju. (Sorry, there is no English word for manju and 'steamed buns' doesn't explain them well.) I found the manju on the first floor of Seibu, Tsukuba. Please hurry to buy some before the season is over.On the other hand, I was bitterly disappointed with an expensive jelly type sweet I bought from another shop. The main store is in Nara and the sample sweets looked lovely so I got one. When I came home and opened it, it didn't look like the picture at all. A sakura blossom was supposed to be in the middle on the top, but mine had a small squashed mass of petals in the top corner. Worse still, it didn't taste like sakura anything and was horrible :(
