Spring has come and cherry blossoms are blooming again!
The Japanese eat cherry flowers.
That does not mean we pick it out and nibble it while taking a walk under cherry trees.
As spring seems just around the corner, sweets or dishes with salted cherry flowers or leaves appear in shops and restaurants. They are made from special cherries of the previous year and available commercially.
It’s like candied or crystalized violets in western countries.
The representative sweet using the salted cherry is a sakura-mochi, a pink-colored rice cake with sweet beans paste center and wrapped in a salted cherry leaf. When this sweet appears in shops, we realize the spring has come.
Sakura-mochi and Kusa-mochi, the later of which contains Japanese mugwort, yomogi and is also a spring sweet.
We have Sakura-Yu, in which hot water is poured on a salted cherry flower for weddings or some auspicious occasion.
The cherry flowers have only faint flavor and the cherry leaves have distinctive smell.
Still those teas and sweets attract people, because we want to welcome this lovely season using every senses.
