Yogurtland

Wow this was the "hottest" cool dessert I've had in a while. There was, and always is, a long but fairly fast moving line of people waiting to get into Yogurtland! I'd never heard of it before, but my pal Vicki had mentioned it on her blog a while back so I was curious. With flavors like classic vanilla, chocolate and strawberry the most conservative of frozen yogurt fans will be happy. For connoisseurs, flavors like mango, taro, peanut butter, pistachio, New York Cheesecake, peach, blueberry, green tea and more will pique your curiosity and you'll have to sample a few.

Many of the fruit flavors come in regular and tart. I preferred the regular mango over the tart.

Part of the fun is that this is a self-serve place that charges 30¢ an oz no matter how many flavors or toppings you choose. My portion ended up costing around $3.50. Not bad, the portion was quite generous.

One trip there and I could understand the allure.. I have no idea where this company originated but it has a definite "Asian" feel to it. The mochi and sweet red, adzuki bean topping options and green tea and taro frozen yogurt kind of gave that away.

If you don't know what mochi is it's a Japanese confection/dessert. It's made by taking sweet white rice and pounding it while it is hot to create a glutinous, sticky mass that is then portioned into small individual serving sizes. I LOVE mochi and manju, which is mochi filled with sweet bean paste. I talk about watching mochi being made in the post I did about the grand reopening of the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco...

The top dessert in the paper cup is a manju filled with sweetened white bean paste, the lower one is a piece of freshly made mochi.

This is a manju I had as dessert at the Apple Inc. cafeteria. Kind of odd to find manju at Apple Inc. but It was a nice, unexpected surprise. Someday I'll do a post all about a local manju shop. It's one of the best in the world and right in downtown San Jose.