Ground Cherry Festival

Allison and I went to the Ground Cherry Festival in Asakusa and I learnt how cool the food at a Japanese festival can be.
They had all kinds of stalls filled with traditional Japanese festival food. Some of it scared the be-Jesus out of me, fish sitting on sticks over open fires, random sticks of meat on the grill, strange pancakes full of meat. But the sweet treats all made my mouth water, the only problem I had was which ones to pick.
I’d already tasted the chocolate covered banana earlier and it was pretty disappointing. These bananas where a little more tempting than the ones I had earlier with their bright colours and crazy decorations. These bananas screamed style and fashion know how, all the locals would look at me and know I was a hip dude with one of these.
They had candy apples too; the cool thing was they came in two sizes. They had really little ones and normal ones too. I don’t know why someone would want less candy apple, but I did see a few around.
The cotton candy came in great looking bags all dressed up with various cartoon characters.
Although we saw so many cool looking treats we decided to start with a bag of mini castella cakes. Normally these cakes are large bricks of soft cake that you find in department store basements but here the guy would make mini round ones right before your eyes.
This treat was Allison’s pick and it was a good one. We made it through a dozen of these in minutes.
My first pick was these strange globs of melted sugar on a stick. Inside each was a piece of fruit either cherry, mandarin orange, or what appeared to be some kind of plum.
Best of all they had a special that night. You pay 200 yen and you play Jan-Ken-Pon (Paper Rock Scissors) with the guy making them. If you win or tie you get two, if you lose you get one. Stupid Rock.
I finished the night with a Aja Manju (sp?), it’s a deep fried treat filled with red bean paste. It was spectacular, and I don’t care that it’s pink.


CC