Wagashi Class
On March 5th, I went to a wagashi making class! It was at a local cooking studio, and I’d been wanting to do it for a while! In fact, I had talked to some of my friends about the wagashi class from this cooking studio back in March 2020, but y’know… some stuff happened in March 2020. But at any rate, it was nice to actually get to attend and learn!
The two wagashi that we learned to make in this 5h class were a nerikiri maple leaf and a kinton Christmas tree. Very seasonally appropriate, haha.
Nerikiri is a bean paste cut with a little gyuhi (a type of mochi) to make it more elastic. We learned a technique called “bokashi” to blend the colours together.
The inside of the nerikiri was a houjicha bean paste.
The kinton for the Christmas tree was made of a matcha yokan, which is a bean paste that is set with agar. We piled it up over a matcha bean paste filling and then decorated it with little ornaments! The colourful ornaments are nerikiri, but we also used arare. For the snow-capped look, we used some crumbled senbei.
It’s pretty hard to see the matcha interior vs the matcha exterior, but it’s there, I promise!
Anyway, I also wrote a much simpler blog post in Japanese to do the whole Japanese practice thing.