• 金塚 has one with cinnamon and brown sugar: Add 2 gr of cinnamon powder, and replace 50 gr of the sugar with brown sugar. That one is very tasty!
• 宿り金(やどりがね): Use 5 gr of kumquat (金柑 in Japanese) peel to make an oleo with the sugar.

👸 This is my idea: Drawing from the かぐや姫-story, where the bamboo choppers find a heaven-sent princess in a bamboo, raise her and continue to find gold in the bamboo they cut to support her upbringing. 金柑 seems fine because it has the 金, that hides in the bamboo, in the name. However, to my Japanese audience, that didn't really track. They didn't know that part of the story, and the 笹(ささ) leaves didn't translate into 竹 for them

➡️ However, the flavour is a bit sharp, so pieces of candied kumquat might be better (and something that's available in May). KM liked the flavour though.

• Serve them with a 黒文字, otherwise they are quite impossible to eat.
• Take one of them on your 懐紙, untie the wrap and open the fold. Since it's 3 leaves, you then put the inner leaf with the filling on the 懐紙, and proceed to roll up the outer two leaves, starting from the tip. Tie that roll with the grass.
• After eating the inner leaf, you roll it up into a triangle shape. Stick the last bit into the triangle so it keeps closed.

• For the 上用粉, which is non-glutinous rice flour, I substituted 上新粉 with 10% potato starch. I think the starch makes it stickier, so leave that away next time if you can't find 上用粉.
• Instead of the traditional いぐさ I used some random grass from the Migros flower shop, which worked well after 15' of boiling (and knotting 2 pieces together to make it longer).
• I tried oiling the leaves a bit, which moderate success.

• While it is normally a sweet, you can use this idea for a variety of foods. Corn, wrapped in its own leaves, for example, makes for a nice summer dish (前菜 in normal 懐石).