Ice Manju: A Truly Japanese Style Ice Cream

The ice here is short for ice cream, and manju is the name of a Japanese confectionary. Manju is normally a sticky rice cake that is filled with a sweet red bean paste. If you replace the rice cake with ice cream, you have Aisu (ice) Manju. To make it easier to eat, it is all on a stick like an ice cream bar. The company plays around with different flavours of ice cream, but the bar always contains red bean paste. Examples of other flavours include hojicha (roasted green tea), matcha, and strawberry, all things that would go well with the anko (red bean paste).

All aisu manju have a red bean paste filling

Recently I've tried the standard vanilla flavour. The ice cream is soft and melts quickly so on a hot day you'll have to eat it quickly (even when in the freezer the ice cream is soft enough to take a bite out of). The anko is sweeter than real manju but that is probably so that it can stand up to the vanilla ice cream. Being a fan of red bean paste, I was pleasantly surprised by how much was inside the ice cream! It is a given that this combination would be tasty, as you can often find cold zenzai (sweet red bean soup) topped with ice cream, or Japanese style parfaits with ice cream and anko, but the great thing here is that you just have to open up the package and eat!

Vanilla flavour

Look at all that anko in there!