Bakery:
Ishiya (イシヤ)
Address:
2 Chome-1 Kita 5 Jonishi, Chuo Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido
Website:
http://www.ishiya.co.jp/
Style:
Japanese
Price:
$$$
Without a doubt the most prolific of Hokkaido commercial confectioneries and certainly one of the most popular among crazed gift box shoppers in all Japan, Ishiya has two department store retail outlets and a handful of cafes in Sapporo, but is also very readily available in souvenir and duty free shops; if you're lucky, you can even find them outside of the country. For all the hoopla and insanity, it was almost a letdown to find those signature biscuit boxes at my local Chinese supermarket. I bought mine at Chitose airport.
Their most famous item has to be their "shiroi koibito", Hokkaido milk biscuits. However, I'm not too into biscuits and it never really feels like a "cake" tour when cookies are involved. They also have two types of cake-of-the-moment baumkuchen: white baumkuchen and premium extra butter baumkuchen (both at 1,296 yen). While the white version seems to be the bestseller, the unnaturally colourless cake didn't exactly look appetizing. Extra butter, on the other hand....
The premium extra butter "namara" baumkuchen claims to be loaded with Hokkaido butter from a local dairy. The cake is a golden brown with precisely measured, crepe-thin layer and just cracking open the plastic packaging, you're hit with a delectable blast of butter aroma. Having bought one of these commercial baumkuchen on my previous trip to Japan and not being a fan, I was pleasantly surprised to find the dough reminiscent more of a real sponge cake, not super soft and unnaturally spongy. You could definitely taste that butter, but I almost want to say the smell was stronger than the taste. The crystallized sugar crust, however, was not to my liking. It was so thin and shattered upon impact, leaving the impression that pieces of cellophane had ended up in your cake; I don't know why, but it bothered me. For a factory-made cake, it wasn't bad.
Rating: **1/2
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