My First Ever Raindrop Cake Experience, At My Cousin’s Place, Bangalore

Imagine a cake that looks exactly like a drop of water. Cut into it, and you feel its lightness – it feels like you are cutting a drop of water. The taste too is exactly the same – just like a drop of water. That is Mizu Shingen Mochi, the Japanese dessert, for you.

The back story

Popularly known as ‘Raindrop Cake’, Mizu Shingen Mochi is the brainchild of the Kinseiken Seika company of Japan. ‘Mizu‘, in Japanese, means ‘water’, and ‘Shingen Mochi‘ is a kind of rice cake that is popular all over Japan. Thus, ‘Mizu Shignen Mochi‘ literally translates to ‘water cake‘. Apparently, the company makes the cake using fresh water from the Japanese Alps, which is so sweet and tasty that the cake doesn’t need any other flavouring!

This dessert was all over the international food world in 2016 and, of course, I wanted a bite of it, too. 🙂

I understand the dessert dissolves into a puddle of water within 30 minutes of being served. Thanks to this fragility, the cake isn’t available at a lot of places, even in Japan. So, when I heard of this eatery called My Cousin’s Place in HSR Layout serving the cake, I had to drag the husband there, one fine weekend, to sample it! (My Cousin’s Place, BTW, earlier used to operate in Electronic City, and has now shifted to HSR Layout. It has a very different-from-the-usual concept of dining, but more about that later. This post is all about the raindrop cake.)

How was my first tryst with the raindrop cake?

When the raindrop cake arrived at our table, the husband and I ooh-ed and aah-ed over it. It looked exactly like a droplet of water on a leaf! This is a work of art all right!

Raindrop cake at My Cousin’s Place

The cake felt and tasted exactly as I had imagined it to be. It felt like a drop of water on my tongue. The cake had no flavour of its own, deriving all its taste only from the mildly sweet powder and syrup it was served with, just as it is supposed to be.

I understand that, traditionally, in Japan, the cake is served with kinako soyabean powder and brown sugar syrup. At My Cousin’s Place, too, I guess, the same two flavouring agents were offered along with the cake. The Japanese often add fresh or dried sakura blossoms to their raindrop cakes, I gather, which, of course, weren’t present in this Indian version.

Considering that I have never sampled the original cake from Japan and have no benchmark to measure this dessert against, I will refrain from doing the same.

Did I like it? Not really. The cake is, obviously, very different from the typical Indian and international desserts that we are used to, so it definitely possesses a novelty value. However, it didn’t satiate the huge sweet tooths that my husband and I possess. But still, this is something really, really cool – something that every foodie must try out at least once in their lifetime. Sampling this cake for the first ever time was, definitely, a dream come true for me, an experience I will cherish forever.

Details

For those of you who are interested, the cake is priced at INR 100 at My Cousin’s Place. You might want to enquire whether the cake is available before you visit, though.

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This cake makes it to the list of seemingly crazy food stuff we have tried out. 

Would you like to know about the other things on the list? Here you go! 

Ice cream sandwich and momo sizzler, Doodh cola, sea salt chocolate, chandan sherbet, momo burger and chocolate momo, ice cream rolls, ice cream chaat, bhoo chakra gadde, rasgulla chaat, chilli chocolate,fried ice cream, and paper sweet.

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