Making wagashi

I’ve always loved eating wagashi, the lovely Japanese confections of sweetened bean paste shaped like flowers, plants, and all manner of seasonal motifs. On a prior trip we even watched them being made before enjoying them with some matcha.

Now it was our turn to make wagashi!

I found a wonderful teacher in Toyko, Momoko Sazawa, who hosted D and me, my cousin, and her husband and daughter for a private lesson. She also offers group classes in English, with different wagashi options every month. I highly recommend her!

For our class, we made two kinds of wagashi: Iris (nerikiri style, made solely of different bean pastes) and Lily Bell (kanoko style, with whole azuki beans surrounding the filling).

We started by working on the Lily Bell, weighing out the sweet bean filling and shaping it into a ball, then carefully laying out the whole beans on a piece of plastic wrap before pressing them around the filling. It was surprisingly difficult to create an attractive, even layer! Once we’d perfected (I use the term loosely) our wagashi, we brushed melted agar over it to create a glistening effect.

Next it was time to color our white bean paste into purple, green, and yellow (each of us ended up with slightly different shades depending on the amount of food coloring used).

The Iris is made with purple and white and a tiny bit of yellow, then shaped by twisting the ball of dough in a piece of plastic wrap that creates a petal-like texture and pressing in three impressions (representing the divisions between the petals) with a wooden tool.

Sazawa-san also supplied us with special tools to shape white paste into tiny bell-shaped flowers, to be set daintily atop the Lily Bell along with finely rolled green stems. Meanwhile, the Irises were finished with green leaves.

Ta Da!

To celebrate our accomplishment, Sazawa-san prepared matcha tea for each of us to accompany our very own wagashi.

It gave me a true appreciation for the mastery of the wagashi chefs who effortlessly create beautifully detailed masterpieces in just moments!

It was a wonderful experience and I’d highly recommend Sazawa-san’s class!