Sakura Mochi

This is sakura mochi, glutinous rice with sakura or cherry blossom flavoring. It doesn't taste like cherries. The mochi is wrapped in sakura leaves. Not everyone eats the leaves, but we do. There are sakura buds on each one. We eat those, too. It is sold in department stores and grocery stores in February and March.

Jiji used to buy it for my birthday cake. (We have four February birthdays so we used to get tired of cake.) We also eat it for hina matsuri. Sakura trees usually bloom in Tokyo at the end of March or in early April.

This box of sakura mochi came from a department store. It was wrapped in paper decorated with sakura blossoms and a drawing of sakura mochi.