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Sakura scent coffee and sweets appear at Japan’s low-key, highly tasty coffeehouse chain

Casey Baseel Feb 12, 2025
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Doutor is getting noticed with a very tempting lineup of cherry blossom coffee, cakes, and more.

As we get closer to the tail end of winter, a lot of people are getting antsy for sakura season to start. Unfortunately, no amount of ardent wishing will make the cherry blossoms bloom any sooner, but what collective desire can do is speed up the release of sakura beverages, sweets, and other treats from Japan’s cafes.

So while most of the year Doutor sort of flies under the radar by being one of Japan’s more low-key coffeehouse chains, they’re grabbing our attention today with their Sakura Fair food and drink lineup, which will be available this month.

Starting things off is the Sakura Scent Caffe Latte, available either hot or iced and priced starting at 530 yen (US$3.50) for small sizes. Doutor takes espresso and adds sakura milk, a mixture of condensed milk and sakura sauce, adding a gentle, sweet flavor to the baseline bitterness. Sakura powder is also sprinkled across the whipped cream topping for some extra springtime-evocative flavor and color.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that even though the beverage is called the Sakura Scent Caffe Latte, cherry blossoms don’t really have much of a fragrance beyond a light vaguely floral one, so “scent” is likely being used here more in a symbolic sense, indicating a noticeable yet not overpowering accent flavor. In addition, Doutor notes that some of its branches may make their Sakura Scent Caffe Latte with a strong non-espresso coffee instead, which one could argue linguistically would make it a Sakura Scent Cafe au Lait.

Not a coffee fan but still thirsty? Doutor is also adding a Sakura Scent Peach Tea (550 yen) to is menu. This iced tea gets enhanced with both peach sauce with bits of fruit and sakura sauce for a beverage that’ll quench your thirst and satisfy your taste buds with its refreshing sweetness.

Of course, you can’t run a successful cafe chain in Japan without a strong dessert lineup, so Doutor has multiple sakura sweets options this year. For those craving Western-style desserts, your first option is the Sakura Scent Strawberry Chocolate Mille Crepe (520 yen), which intersperses whipped cream and strawberry chocolate between its multiple thin crepe layers before being topped with a strawberry nappage jam glaze covered with sakura whipped cream and streaks of sakura sauce.

On the other hand, if you want something simpler and more sakura-focused, the Sakura Baumkuchen cake (280) is here for you.

Fans of Japanese sweets haven’t been forgotten, though. Doutor is whipping up Sakura Dorayaki (280 yen), which combines a dorayaki (sweet red beans sandwiched between a pair of small pancake-like cakes) and puts a sakura Daifuku dumpling, itself also filled with sweet red beans, at the center.

And if you want a hybrid Western/Japanese dessert with sakura flavors? Doutor has that too, in the form of the Sakura Honey Sakura Castella (730 yen for a pack of five slices). Castella cakes were one of Japan’s first domestically popularized adaptations of Western sweets, adjusting Portuguese sponge cake recipes to appeal to local palates, and this special variety uses sakura honey, a hard-to-find variety collected from hives whose bees have collected the nectar from flowering cherry blossom trees.

While the appeal of the entire lineup is obvious, exactly when we’ll be able to start eating and drinking these treats is a bit less clear. In its announcement, Doutor designates the Sakura Scent Caffe Latte, Sakura Scent Peach Tea, and Sakura Scent Strawberry Chocolate Mille Crepe as its three “Gentle Sakura Scent Fair” items, and that the fair begins on February 20. However, the same announcement also says that the Sakura Scent Strawberry Chocolate Mille Crepe will be offered until February 19, one day before the fair starts, and “until February 19” is also in its notes for the Sakura Dorayaki and Sakura Baumkuchen. However, none of the items appear to be available yet at Doutor branches, so we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that those “until February 19” clauses are actually supposed to be “from February 19,” while also keeping our eyes peeled for when these actually do start showing up in the cafes.

Source, images: PR Times
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