Hogetsu - Part 1

Okay, I'm back and this time the photos are from Flickr...it took me a while to learn how to do it. Upload photos, organize into sets. Cut and paste. All that shit. Anyways, here is my first box of rice cakes from Hogetsu Japanese sweet shop in Chula Vista. My husband was the one who chose these...he went the day they 'reopened' since the owners were out of town. The box of 9 came wrapped with a ribbon...

Here is the whole collection (that's TC's hand in there)...

This one was filled with red bean - the rice cake itself was greenish...the flavor kind of bland.

This next one was just a jiggly and oh-so-soft-as-a-baby's-butt rectangle of orange flavored mochi, which was chosen for TC.

This one was the same except there was no citrus flavor.

Bert chose this because of the design. Unfortunately, we let it go too long...It was in the fridge for about 4 days, then it got all hard and gross. I took a bite out of it and it tasted like a bean filled siaopao.  I think was a 'manju', a steam baked cake.

I  really liked this one - it was pink and again, so soft and strokably smooth. Gosh, that sounds so pornographic, but really, you should touch one of these. It's even better biting into one! Ha ha.

This was a rainbow striped mochi -

This was the prettiest of all - it was lavender with a yellow dot in the middle. There was a long green leafy design, but the tip was broken off. Nevertheless, it looked quite lovely and tasted just as good. The filling was red bean.

That's it for now...I have another set of pix which will have to wait for another post. The woman working at Hogetsu, according to Bert, was pretty curt with him. She wasn't really friendly and didn't seem like she wanted to explain any of the different mochis to him even though he thought he asked politely. When he asked her what kinds of filling there were, she said, "Red bean and white bean". Silence. Okay....there's more but I won't get into it. He didn't take it personally so WTF right? After our experience at Fugestu in LA's Little Tokyo, I thought maybe there would be more variety and flavors like peanut butter and chocolate, but alas, there's only 2 kinds.

Each piece is about $1 which is pretty good. All of their mochi/manju are handmade by the owners. The husband was either out or working in the back. Only the woman was in the front that day.

Click on my previous Hogetsu post if you want to see how the strip mall sign and the facades...When I first went back in mid-January, they were out of town. Not sure if the buildings are fixed up yet, but yeah...that's how it looks....If you go on that post, you can see the other links that reference Hogetsu(Kirbie and Kirk).