味自慢 木于卜饅頭: I treated myself to this unusual snack from the Japanese supermarket Tokyo Fish Market without knowing anything about what it was. Guided by just a few words of English, I understand that it's a wheat cake filled with a red bean paste dyed white and yellow and topped with black sesame seeds. Each cookie is generously sized, but at 235 calories each, you would hope so. The snack overall eats a tad dry and is best accompanied by milk (I imagine it would pair well with tea too). It's intere... (read more) 3.0/5.0
tokyofishmarket japanese redbean cake 木于卜饅頭 3.0
Uji Purple Potato Soft Serve: Returning to this small ice cream shop on Shattuck to sample additional soft serve flavors, I tried their seasonal purple potato ice cream, which came in a lovely shade of lavender. The ice cream had a rich milk flavor with only a hint of potato at the end. Given that the tofu, black sesame, and matcha flavors from Uji are all vastly superior (I've sampled all three flavors by now), I wouldn't recommend the purple potato ice cream, but it's decent. 3.0/5.0
icecream japanese berkeley uji purple potato soft serve 3.0 ujitime softserve
Pocky Strawberry Cream Covered Biscuit Sticks: In a special (what I presume to be) Valentine's Day edition, Pocky tweaks its round biscuit shape to produce a heart-shaped cross section. The heart is most visible on the biscuit end, though it looks more like a 45-degree bracket than a heart. On the strawberry-coating end, the heart is nearly impossible to make out. With an impressively long list of ingredients (largely to do with the coating), these Pocky biscuits actually taste no different than the normal strawberry ones. The coatin... (read more) 3.0/5.0
heart pocky strawberry cream covered biscuit sticks 3.0 japanese
Koreana Plaza Market Mochi: Inside the Koreana Plaza Market in Oakland is a small cash-only bakery with a variety of asian sweets, including lotus-paste-filled pastries (review forthcoming), pineapple buns, and almond cookies. I purchased a pack of two red-bean mochi (despite the oven-fresh sticker on the packaging, I'm pretty sure they were steamed). The mochi are about 125% the size of packaged mochi. Biting into a piece, I could instantly tell that it was very fresh. The glutinous rice flour had a bit more resis... (read more) 3.0/5.0
oakland sweets dessert japanese koreanaplazamarket mochi 3.0
Benkyodo Co Mochi: One of the original mochi shops in the US, Benkyodo in Japantown, SF opened back in 1906. Today, the storefront is an odd mix of diner counter, Asian 7-11-type snacks, and fresh made mochi. All of their mochi come in cupcake liners and taste very fresh because they are. The texture is softer than I personally prefer, and there is a little too much starch that coats your mouth with each bite. But I did enjoy that they were not overly sweet. The best was certainly a mango mochi that had f... (read more) 3.0/5.0
japantown sanfrancisco japanese sweets dessert benkyodoco mochi 3.0
Yoshimi Yakitokibi: Several months ago, I wrote a review of Trader Joe's mochi rice nuggets, a fried savory glutinous rice snack unlike any other mochi I had eaten up to that point. Irregularly shaped, almost like golden nuggets, they were crunchy and dense - the polar opposite of the chewy texture I associate with mochi. Recently, I was gifted a bag of corn-flavored fried mochi crackers, brought back all the way from Japan, where this particular flavor can only be purchased in Hokkaido. The texture and shap... (read more) 3.0/5.0
japanese corn hokkaido mochi crackers friend asian yoshimi yakitokibi 3.0