After getting super excited about a mochi kneading machine a few weeks ago, our minds have been stuck on the world of Japanese dessert recipes.
Most of us have probably had ice cream-filled mochi or a scoop of green tea ice cream, but we wanted to dig down into some more traditional and more interesting options. What we found: a lot of red beans. Japanese cuisine uses sweetened adzuki bean paste in more applications than you can imagine. Also ubiquitous, mochi: a glutinous, chewy rice cake that we have fallen completely in love with. Mochi can be a dumpling in a sweet dessert soup, baked, fried, stuffed with green tea cream -- the possibilities begin to feel endless. One last finding: Japanese desserts are some of the most beautiful, meticulously crafted sweets we've ever seen.
We are by no means experts on the subject, only excited, hungry novices. If you have a favorite Japanese dessert that we've missed, please let us know in the comments so that we can go eat it!