Hi, my name is Emily, and… I’m not a dessert person.
I never have been. Sure, there are a few sweets I have a hard time passing up – lemon tart in any form, a very specific raspberry cream pie – but for the most part, if I’m still hungry at the end of the meal, I want more savory (generally in the form of cheese) rather than anything sweet.
But if I lived in Japan, friends, I think I’d be a dessert person.
For the most part, I think this is because desserts here tend to have a note of earthiness to them that stands up to all that sugar. For another, it’s because I’ve found that by and large, desserts here (at least the ones I’ve been trying) just aren’t all that sweet. And I got my fill of not-too-sweet desserts in Nara.
I’ve been a mochi fan since high school, when my Korean friend introduced me to this glutinous rice flour snack. At the time, I was partial to varieties stuffed with red beans and black sesame, but the first ones I tried in Nara were stuffed, instead, with whole pieces of fruit.
The mochi at Ichibanya Fruits Café were packaged like little jewels. This box even had an ice pack to keep the mochi cold!
The mochi itself was unsweetened, but each piece was stuffed with a chunk of the ripest fruit…
Or, in one case, cooked Japanese sweet potato. *Swoon*
But our favorite, no contest, was the pineapple.
(We ate three of these bad boys.)
But Ichibanya was not the only mochi shop we visited in Nara. We had read about a spot called Nakatanidou, where you could watch them pound the mugwort mochi by hand.
Unfortunately, on the day of our visit, the mochi had already been made… but that didn’t stop us from having a taste.
The green mugwort mochi was stuffed with adzuki bean paste and dusted with roasted soybean flour, an earthy combo that was a bit too medicinal for bro and sis. No matter – I was happy to take one for the team and finish the whole thing.
And there were other sweets that were more up their alley. These doughnuts from Floresta were absolutely delicious and came in a host of different flavors, like spicy cinnamon-sugar and green tea.
Our fave turned out to be ginger-brown sugar. Both this one and the cinnamon-sugar doughnut were far zingier than American versions of this flavor combo have a tendency to be, bright with spice and a bit of natural heat.
We also sampled a fresh pancake, the address for which I unfortunately don’t have, as it was being made by a man who had parked his cart on the side of the road.
Each fluffy pancake was stuffed with sweet red bean paste and served hot and fresh off the griddle.
Ichibanya Fruits Café -２３８ Minamikoriyamacho, Yamatokoriyama, Nara 639-1007
Nakatanidou – ï¼’ï¼™ Hashimotocho, Nara, 630-8217
Floresta – 〒630-8226 Nara, Konishicho