“Habutae-mochi” is the lightly sweet and soft Japanese well-known sweets that is recognized as the souvenirs from Fukui prefecture for a long time. I visited old-established Japanese sweets store since I heard there’s Japanese sweet that I can enjoy their taste and texture even more.

Sand the melty rice cake with fluffy bread

“Matsuoka-ken” which is good-old atmosphere Japanese sweets store is located in ten minutes’ walk from Fukui train station on the main road. This place is an origin of “Habutae-mochi” which is known as the famous Fukui sweets.  This store used to sell white pongee fabrics like a silk (Habutae), but they started running a sweets business one hundred years ago. The thin and silky rice cake which was named after this story is an excellent Japanese sweet.

　They came up with the idea to put this typical rice cake inside of Dora-yaki (a red-bean pancake) about thirty years ago. Actually, they knew the rice cake would go with dora-yaki because “Hagoromo-monaka” that put rice cake inside the Monaka (red-beans sandwiched between two thin crisp wafers made from rice) was popular about fifty years ago. This dora-yaki is like by food critic, Yukio Hattori, food writer, Asako Kishi and some of the other food specialists. The melty rice cake, plenty of red-bean made in Hokkaido and the pan cake buns make this sweet soft and fluffy. It is also its characteristic that it is lightly sweetened.

The secret specialty food which has addictive texture is limited on sale for summer

There is bamboo whisk for making Japanese tea decorated inside the old showcase in the store. Their appearance matches with atmosphere of this store. The owner, Ritsuko Kawashima, said “there are a lot of people in summer. They’re sometimes having long lines of people. ” She said that there is café space inner part of this store only in summer time. What are people coming here to get is summer time exclusive food “hand-made shaved ice.”

They shave the ice with a plane for each bowl after they get an order. It has an addictive texture which has both smooth ice and crushed ice, and some people said that they don’t feel like it is summer if they don’t eat this food. People from all over Japan are coming to get this. The sauces that go on the top of shaved ice such as maccha syrup, sweet red-beans and black sugar syrup are all made from scratch. They can’t send shaved ice to your house, so I would like you to visit this store.

■Matsuokaken Main shop

Address: 3-5-19 Chuo, Fukui-shi, Fukui

Koji Yamada(Photo/Fusosha)

Yuko Tanaka(Interview & Article/Fusosha)

Provided media:FUSOSYA 「NIHONZENKOKU OTORIYOSETECHO WEB」

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