Gomagashi – Japanese sesame crackers

Mother deer and old bean love to have snacks when they’re watching their tv and well, after a while, it gets hard to find snacks that they’ll actually enjoy. Recently, mother deer ran out of gomagashi Japanese sesame crackers we got for her in Japan. She loved those little treats and was disappointed when she ran out of them. So, lil bun and I read the ingredients on the back of the packages and figured we could attempt to make something similar. What we planned on making would be something similar to the sesame seed candies you so often see at the checkout counters in grocery stores. We also decided to go ahead and add sunflower seeds to ours because mother deer likes those too.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
3 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons water

Let’s get cooking:

1. Roast the sesame and sunflower seeds in a pan on low heat until you can smell their aroma then transfer them into a small bowl.

2. Next, combine brown sugar, honey and water in a sauce pan over low heat to make the syrup.

3. When large bubbles begin to form, take the pot off the heat. Repeatedly lift the pot off the heat when it starts to bubble until the syrup thickens. DO NOT STIR IT.

4. The syrup is thick enough if it can harden up when you drop it in a cup of water. When your syrup is thick enough, you can take it off the heat, if not, it needs to be simmered longer.

5. Add the toasted seeds

6. Mix the ingredients together.

7. Once everything is incorporated, pour the batter onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

7. Place another piece of parchment paper on top of the mixture and roll it out until it’s 1cm thick.

8. Let your crackers cool down for 10 minutes on the counter before transferring it into the fridge for another 10 minutes.

9. When the crackers firm up, cut the crackers into squares

We really weren’t sure how these were going to turn out because it was really hard for us to control the cooking of the syrup and we didn’t know if we had accidentally burnt it or not ): But, luckily for us, it turns out we didn’t and they turned out okay. Now, it was the moment of truth because we weren’t sure if mother deer was going to like these all that much because they were our own little creation but in the end she did! Although they weren’t as thick as the candies that she normally eats, she didn’t mind them this way. Even brother deer who isn’t a fan of sesame liked them! So, I would say that this Japanese sesame crackers recipe was a success!