Japanese sweets, or wagashi, are carefully crafted sweets made with sugar, starch, rice, bean paste, and water. These sweets are unique to Japan and are best enjoyed with green tea. Kanshudo Honten is a sweets shop that also offers a sweets making workshop for 2000 yen (about $20). For 1.5 hours participants make 4 kinds of sweets.
The fist sweet was Koubai Sakura. This was a sugar paste (like gum paste) that was cut into the shape of cherry blossoms. Next, was Hatune Kocho. This was a sugar dough called Uiro, which was wrapped and pinched together around sweet bean paste to resemble a bird once sesame seed eyes were added. Third, we attemped to make a multi color sweet by dividing the pink dough, placing a bit of white inside and smashing it into a pancake. This pancake was then wrapped around a ball of bean paste, and due to the streching the white should have come through a little to make the sweet multicolored. Mine did not turn out that well, but below is a professional doing the same procedure with much better results. Finally, we make Jou-namagashi Kinton, which is a type of dough that is like hard jello. This is pushed through a strainer to make strands of 'kinton'. A ball of bean paste is then used to pick up the strands on the outside, and also applied to the ball with chopsticks once the bottom is covered, until the ball resembles a tangled ball of old yarn. Overall, the experience was great. The instructor talked so fast my Japanese friends had trouble keeping up, but we all had fun making out creations :)
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