Greetings From an Experimental Japanese Sweet!

[leene_chan]

We are Sakura-Cream Cheese Mushipan!

We were made with Trappist Cherry Jam, but five drops of red food coloring made us pink!

The two who made us have never had sakura mushipan, so they had to make up their own recipe using a recipe from the Japanese site cookpad.com as the base. We know we're supposed to have a salted cherry leaf on the bottom, and only come out in April. But we're here now, so tough luck!

We have homemade anko (sweetened red bean paste) inside us! (Sorry for the bad picture.) It was made from dried beans and everything. (The skins were still a little tough, so we had to push the finished product through a sieve before we dropped it in the batter). It is pretty good, even if it does make peeling off the muffin wrapper kind of tough.

Note from the creator: I was worried these weren't going to taste right, but they were actually really good. I ate two! Kristen translated the basic steamed cheese bread recipe from cookpad and then we made some adjustments. Mainly, we ended up sifting the dry ingredients into the wet and wisking them together rather than just folding them in. I'm pretty sure sakura mushipan isn't supposed to have cream cheese in it, but it turned out good that way. And it all came together in under 30 minutes--except the anko, which had to be made a day in advance.