Egraphsen
Stephanie Cullingford
Theatrical Design
Sakuraco
Box Seven - September 2021
Part Two
October 10 2021
Ah, spring, warmish days and cool nights, wildflowers that spread for thousand of kilometers - and can be seen from space, according to Private Life of Plants, David Attenborough's finest work (the soundtrack alone..!). It's time for the Royal Show and see the sights from the top of the ferris wheel, watch the fireworks each night while perching dangerously on the roof. Ahem. Now, without further ado: the thrilling conclusion to my review of my seventh Sakuraco box...
Hazy Days
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My picture wall is growing!​
The Geraldton Wax card is by a local company called Braw Paper Co. (using natural inks, no less)
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Liberty Dies with Thundrous Applause is by Etsy seller Forever Grow
and is actually a brooch in a box frame.
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You needed a closer look, didn't you?
The Food (part two)
Spring Water Utage Jelly
The way that the jelly is wrapped made me nervous: it reminded me of Warabi mochi and Kuzumochi - neither of which had much taste (and too much texture), and with Spring Water being the named as the main flavour, my hopes were somewhat low. Utage, in case you're wondering, seems to mean 'party or banquet' (and so roughly synonymous with 'festival', which makes it very appropriate. The packaging is pretty and simple with washi-style paper wrapped over a jelly bucket marked with a stylised 'S'/ sweep in rough/smooth plastic. It looks as though the paper was originally designed to be held in place by a thin piece of tape with the label printed on it (and still bears the rough cut edge) but that has now become vestigial.
The jelly is a beautiful pale green, with bands of differing translucency running through it, like the Milky Way. These, I assume are apple pulp, and it does taste like apples, green apples, which are the only ones worth eating (when we were small my best friend's mum used to cut off all the skin in an effort to disguise the red ones. I always knew, and never ate them!). So while this did taste a lot like the hanabi jelly, it was much nicer because the flavour was sure. It also had a slightly fluffy texture when eating the pulp swirls and you felt like you were getting some fibre. Spring water and fibre. Practically healthy!
Sencha tea
The packaging is uninteresting and tastes like grass and green tea.
The tea cup is my sister's and from a T2 Moroccan collection about eight years ago, and the saucer from an unrelated (and ugly) cup, but hey, it works.
Handcrafted Ginger Cinnamon Candy
After a drought of five boxes (2-6) we finally have some Sakuraco exclusives - yay! They are ginger-cinnamon and, at first glance are basically rock candy ('rock' as in 'Brighton Rock', not a geode). First glance would be wrong. These little sweeties are the direct discendant of amezaiku, which is a cross between glass-blowing and boiled sweets. It is made from mizuame ('water candy') which is made from starch - traditionally rice or millet - that is both sweet and perfectly clear, but only if held at the right temperature (if you've ever tried to make pure white Fluffy frosting and had your syrup turn into toffee, you know what they're talking about) that is then shaped into a menagerie of real and fantastical beasts, painted and sold at festivals from stalls. It's a dying art - and a theatrical one, much like the glass blowers that used to be at every market when I was a child. I remember standing transfixed as a glass blower made koalas at Cairns market, stamping the veins on the gum-leaf with a pair of minute tongs, dessert forgotten.
Given how insanely fragile these creations are (either glass or amezaiku) it makes sense to create amekashi - sweets that use the same techniques but travel easily. They're very plesant and taste like winter, with ginger, cinnamon and orange (just a hint) like a fancy cough-drop. To be honest, I can't really tell the difference between this and rock candy, but the flavours are beautiful and natural, though a little 'dry', again it tates like powdered ginger rather than, say, ginger juice.
Ukai Senbei
These senbei are classically not rice crackers (for starters, they're wheat). The packaging is simple with a matte plastic front with dark red details and translucent red back - which gives the whole pack a feeling of depth. The actual crackers are what I'm going to call cauldron-shaped (let me know if I'm missing something here) and very crispy-crunchy: quite similar to the matcha senbei we had a few boxes back, but thicker, and the bubbles are smaller and tightly packed. The birds (I think they're cranes, but the tasting guide says birds and I don't know enough ornithology/ Japanese design to argue), apparently are 'branded' on. The taste is a simple sweet biscuit.
Melonpan
I really wish this had been one of the items in the Melon box: the taste is much gentler... According to the notes melonpan is a street pastry (presumably made with layers of dough and custard): the name coming from it's resemblace to striped melons (there's a whole wack of striped melons, apparently, not just the water). The package is simple and green, showing off the product - and stripes - inside. It smells like melon and yeast and is one of the few things made with rice-flour that doesn't taste ricey (considering that it's also made with wheat, perhaps there isn't much rice in it). This is definitely a bread, and I like to think that that is where the 'pan' comes from (Latin, most famously used in Hunger Games' Panam)
As you can see the melonpan is really quite enormous, so you're definitely getting bang-for-buck here, pefect accompaniment to a good book (The Golden Bough by James Frazer to be specific), and you can definitely see the layers of the custard (which has definitely not been 'folded' in)
Petit Kabuki Crackers
Apart from being petit, these crackers seem to have gotten their name mostly from their packaging as it "is an homage to the curtain used in Kabuki. the classic geometric pattern features lines in green, black and persimmon". And the world needs more persimmon. They're a type of age which is deep fried mochi (slow fried like the Okinawan doughnuts for the funky shapes?).
Packaging wise, I'm torn between making it BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS that kabuki is involved, and being zen that it's a subtle reference. I really hope that they are also eaten while watching kabuki (on TV, obviously. Don't eat in the theatre). They smell like soy sauce and they taste like soy sauce, but they are not very salty - or sweet, despite the fact that they're supposed to be 'flavoured' with sugar. Like other age crackers we've had, they are crunchy-fluffy and pleasant.
Shrimp and Sesame Age Mochi
The packaging of these age mochi is cute and simple, three colours geometric abstract pattern of circles of different densities. Each of the strips has a different flavour (shrimp, nori, konbu, dried bonito, presumably) but none really taste like sesame. They're similar to the kombu arare crackers in the previous box, insofar as each one is also slightly differently coloured, but which flavour is which colour I can't really tell, and, while they all have a soft fishiness, the pink ones are definitely the fishiest.
Sweet Potato Sachi Steamed Cake
Whoops! I forgot about the poor cake (I wanted to try it warm and didn't have the time on the day) and the flowers wilted, so here is a new bunch... propped up on three books so awesome they look fake (Dickens, in case you're interested).
I love the packaging, it's very reminiscent of the beni imo tart in the Okinawa box - bright pink, purple and ochre, much like the cake it's self.
It is a steamed cake, so cold it has a slightly sticky, rubbery feel, and when cold feels and smells like mashed sweet potato. After being warmed in the microwave for 15-20 seconds, the smell has morphed into something a bit more cake like with a milky-vanillaness, but the texture remains the same, with a gluey feel, like a dense pudding rather than cake. The taste is sweetish, but hard to place - fuity? vegetal? azuki-like? I'm glad the tasting guide said to heat it up.
Unlike the Beni Imo featured in August, the satsumaimo potato is purple on the ouside and white on the inside (it changes colour to yellow when cooked). I'm not sure exactly what 'sachi' refers to, given that I can only match one of the two major 'title' characters on the packet, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest 'happiness/good fortune/good harvest'
That's all Folks, the Box is done, and I give it 10/10, for taste, satisfaction, beauty, value for money, all those good things
So glad that the box saw the return of Sakuraco exclusives (just when we were begining to think them legendary). Sorry how late this got - I genuinely finished in September and then, y'know, life.
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For happy lively time with your friends, let's relax with confectionaries
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See you in October!
~ Steph
