Grocery Shopping

I had the most glorious grocery shopping trip today.  And now as I read that in my head, I realize it sounds sort of crazy. But truthfully, I love grocery shopping even in the US, and today was even better because I found all sorts of fun things that I'm really excited about!

I went to two stores in Jiyugaoka which is a really cute neighborhood a little farther out from the center of Tokyo.  The first store was Cuoca - which is a baking store!  And the second, Kaldi Coffee, is a smaller reasonably priced import grocery store.  Both were totally awesome, though Cuoca had a little less English labeling than I expected.  Most things I can identify fairly well, but bags of white powder - are they flour? corn starch? potato starch? powdered sugar? a baking mix?  I used my kindergarten level reading skills to eliminate a lot of possibilities, and then realized there was a bag of powdered sugar labeled in English, the shelf was just covering up that part.

So, what am I buying all these product for, since I don't even have an oven?  Well, Raku and I are making gingerbread men for our Christmas party - in her oven.  And, I am embracing new food traditions here by making a Japanese Christmas Cake!  (haha, can you think of a tamer food to try?)  A Christmas Cake is basically a strawberry shortcake sort of layer cake, with Christmas decorations on top.  I'm going to do a whole post on creating it.  But, now on to the pictures!  

 Look at all these baking supplies!  Beautiful!  I bought most of them at Cuoca, but the sponge cake came from Kaldi Coffee.

 Brown sugar and powdered sugar!  And these are awesome sizes for Japan too!

Speaking of awesome sizes, see this bag of penne I found at Cuoca?  It's a whole kilo!  (That's more than double a 16 oz box)  Normally I see bags a quarter of this size.  And it was only 600 yen!  (John will surely be thrilled that I bought a kilo of pasta 4 days before a move - but how could I resist?)  And that's also a box of red zinger tea for 100 yen less than anywhere else I've seen.  Thank you Kaldi Coffee!

And thank you readers for listening to rhapsodize about grocery shopping.