Blog » Wagashi

My baba-chan in Tokyo always has a package of Mitarashi Dango on her dining table by her Zojirushi. I look back fondly on those afternoons when I'd sit around and eat dango with her while Richard Clayderman streamed out of her tape player. Mitarashi Dango are rice dumplings draped in...

Ever since shelter in place came into effect, I have been diving head first into two indulgences: K-dramas and sweets, often at the same time. It took me a few tries with the K-dramas. I got about three episodes into Let's...

Kohi zeri (coffee jelly) is a common dessert in Japan. You can find it everywhere - prepackaged at the conbini, at craft coffee shops like Maldive in Shimokitazawa, heck you can even get one fresh off the plane at Royal Coffee Shop...

My two favorite desserts are pie and anmitsu. The word is a mashup of two of its main ingredients anko (red bean paste) and mitsu (syrup). Although I can access good pie in Oakland, there is literally no place I can get anmitsu. Every...

A step-by-step recipe of how to make Miss Blanche, a Fuyu persimmon and yuzu juice kanten dessert. Japanese sweets for winter. Vegan-friendly, gluten-free.

A step-by-step recipe to make Matcha Sesame Tofu, which can be eaten as a sweet dessert or savory side dish, when topped with shoyu and wasabi.

Kanten is a jelly-like substance made from agar agar. It’s completely vegan and gluten free. In this recipe, I used three fresh yuzu to make yuzu kanten.

Japan has a wonderful fall tradition known as otsukimi (お月見) or Moon Festival, which celebrates both the moon and promise of a good harvest for the year. Besides otsukimi, it's also called chushu no meigetu or jyugoya. The custom is believed to have originated in China. In...

On the very special occasion that a visitor from Japan would bring Toraya to our home in Cupertino, I would actually be excited about eating. I was a very picky, skinny child, but whenever my mom busted out the Toraya I...

In Japan, everything is made easy for busy housewives who have to raise kids, clean the house, yet also have to cook and make dessert. You throw things in a microwave and five minutes later, you can a serve main course to your hungry kids and...

After reading Moto's post about making anko (sweet bean paste), I began to reminisce about my visit to a wagashi (traditional Japanese confectionary) shop in Koishikawa, Tokyo called Ikko-an. All of the wagashi are made by hand by the owner Chikara Mizukami, while his wife works...

My most recent obsession is making anko (sweet bean paste) from scratch. As I wrote in my strawberry daifuku post a couple of weeks ago, using bean paste as dessert doesn't really exist in the west. But I am trying to find ways to...

By Kenji Miura I celebrated Christmas in Japan by making wagashi, or traditional Japanese sweets. Santa is shaped out of shiro-an (white bean paste). The holly is made out of ogura tsubu-an (red beans boiled with sugar, skin-on). The tree is comprised of shiro-an and...

A recipe for a Japanese dessert: It takes a mizu-yokan recipe and a matcha-kuzu kanten (agar) and plates them next to one another.

I know, I know, I have to revisit the Flødeboller Battle, but it takes too much effort so I diverted to macarons this week. You may be sick of how I keep praising myself for making perfect macarons, but if you know the precision...