I want a cupcake.
Not a crappy Hostess cupcake. A nice, dense, buttercream-frosted American cupcake. You can't find those in Kitakami.
Good sweets aren't hard to find here. There are no fewer than six European-style bakeries in town, turning out delicious cheesecakes, eclairs, and whipped-cream-filled sponge rolls. This is true of many places in Japan, which is one of my favorite things about the country. Among packaged snacks, there's a lot to like -- the omnipresent and overwhelming variety of Pocky biscuit sticks, McVitie's digestive biscuits (Banana Blacks, where are you? Last year, you stole my heart as a result of the twelve-minute dash from the JR Sakamachi Station to the convenience store for snacks and back to catch our train. Now, you are nowhere to be found.), and many other little cookies whose third or fourth ingredient must be crack. The tofu cheese and the gift doughnuts at the local Okinawan joint. Black sesame sweet potato pies from Mister Donut. The black sesame gelato at the Namahaga Coffee Company in Akita City. Mochi. Youkan, if you're into bean jelly.
But cupcakes . . . I got nothing. When I worked in Southwest DC, I could run over to the closest Starbucks (which is to say the one two blocks away, rather than the one three blocks away) to pick up a drink and a cupcake to enjoy in my office. The closest Starbucks now is in Morioka, which is an hour north by train and may or may not have cupcakes (and, being a Japanese Starbucks, carries the inherent risk that its cupcakes will be, say, melon. Not a bad thing per se, just a thing.). They weren't the best cupcakes in the world, and the chocolate ones were infinitely better than the vanilla, but man, do I miss those cupcakes right now.
Matthew's craving, incidentally, is equally insatiable: scrapple.
Oh, elusive cupcake. Can't make you, can't buy you, can't get you out of my mind.
Not a crappy Hostess cupcake. A nice, dense, buttercream-frosted American cupcake. You can't find those in Kitakami.
Good sweets aren't hard to find here. There are no fewer than six European-style bakeries in town, turning out delicious cheesecakes, eclairs, and whipped-cream-filled sponge rolls. This is true of many places in Japan, which is one of my favorite things about the country. Among packaged snacks, there's a lot to like -- the omnipresent and overwhelming variety of Pocky biscuit sticks, McVitie's digestive biscuits (Banana Blacks, where are you? Last year, you stole my heart as a result of the twelve-minute dash from the JR Sakamachi Station to the convenience store for snacks and back to catch our train. Now, you are nowhere to be found.), and many other little cookies whose third or fourth ingredient must be crack. The tofu cheese and the gift doughnuts at the local Okinawan joint. Black sesame sweet potato pies from Mister Donut. The black sesame gelato at the Namahaga Coffee Company in Akita City. Mochi. Youkan, if you're into bean jelly.
But cupcakes . . . I got nothing. When I worked in Southwest DC, I could run over to the closest Starbucks (which is to say the one two blocks away, rather than the one three blocks away) to pick up a drink and a cupcake to enjoy in my office. The closest Starbucks now is in Morioka, which is an hour north by train and may or may not have cupcakes (and, being a Japanese Starbucks, carries the inherent risk that its cupcakes will be, say, melon. Not a bad thing per se, just a thing.). They weren't the best cupcakes in the world, and the chocolate ones were infinitely better than the vanilla, but man, do I miss those cupcakes right now.
Matthew's craving, incidentally, is equally insatiable: scrapple.
Oh, elusive cupcake. Can't make you, can't buy you, can't get you out of my mind.