Valentine’s Day is coming. Surely the sweet on the Day has to be Chocolate. According to me, if it is Chocolate sweet the flavour should be Raspberry.
So I made Japanese sweet iwith Chocolate and Raspberry flavour.
I have to remind you that this is not a normal Chocolate sweet. It is still a Japanese sweet ‘Wagashi’ with Chocolate flavour. So the ingredients of the outer part is mainly White Beans with Chocolate Powder.
Happy New Year to you all again! Hope you had great Christmas and New Year’s Day. The first sweet I would like to introduce you in 2017 is this sweet called ‘Hanabira Mochi‘.
‘Hanabira‘ means flower petal in Japanese so I shall call this sweet Petal Mochi.
It is a sweet we traditionaly have only during New Year period. It started in the palace to celebrate a New Year by eating two layers of white and red mochi with some other food. Until the Meiji period the custom spread out to people in the country and the food got simplified onto some similar type of sweet that I made here.
Brand New Year has arrived! During 2016 I experienced many new things and thank you all the people who visited my Blog. I wish you all a very Happy New Year! 🙂
This year we are having very mild winter in England. We hardly need to heat rooms during daytime and wear gloves outside. So it is very unlikely that we are going to have a White Christmas. Although it is not cold, in my mind “Winter = Snow” so another sweet I made in the Winter theme was this one.
It is made of ‘Mochi‘ Rice Cake type of sweet.
Our yearly event ‘Christmas Market’ is over!
Thank you very much for the people who came to the Market and stopped by our Sakura Junction stall. My preparation for the market started a week earlier and in the morning on the day I finally wrapped up my sweets for taking them to the venue.
These are some of the little ones.
How time flies! I feel like it was just a month ago that I mentioned Sakura Junction had a successful stall in the Christmas Market in 2015. Now it is the time again that we are going to have a stall for introducing our sweets to public.
The 🎄Christmas Market🎄 is actually TOMORROW!!
These are some of the range that I am going to take for the market.
On top of the various Japanese sweets we are going to serve ‘Chicken Kara-age (Japanese Fried Chiken)’ this year.
There are Sushi and some other food as well. You can have nice Japanese lunch or Tea with my sweet there.
The venue is in North London. If you live near by or even from different part of London please pop in to see me. I have been working very hard to prepare for this occasion so will be very happy if you come to say ‘Hi’ in person💓
The Market is open only for 4 hours! So don’t miss it! See you there.
This is one of the sweets I assorted for creating the Sweet Gift Box in an Autumn theme which I introduced on my previous post. It might look like a normal western cake but it is actually very Japanese sweet.
Just before Halloween I received an order for a gift box of Japanese Sweets. I was told that the gift was for a family with Japanese and also some non-Japanese people so that the client wanted me to make variety of sweets that could be enjoyed by everybody. I thought a lot to decide which sweets were most suitable and seasonal for this occasion.
These are the finalists for “Autumn Sweet Box Set”.
The selected sweets for this occasion in the photo (↑) from right to left
In case you cannot get a good view of them from the top these are the side shots of them which are much closer.
Day by day Autumn is setting in here in London. First thing which comes to my mind by thinking about Autumn is colour change in Leaves. It would defines as Autumn Colours so it should be the most significant part of this season. In Japan we have four completely different seasons. Warm & beautiful Spring with lots of Cherry blossom, very hot & humid Summer, very cold Winter with deep snow in some area and then … this Autumn. Our Autumn is very between summer and winter, but it is not just that. During the transition period between two totally different seasons a significant temperature change causes the beautiful Autumn Colour in leaves. The Nature is Science. It is amazing!
Japan is a very mountainous country and the sight of mountains in Autumn colour is so magnificent. It does not get defeated by the sight of marvellous view of Sakura, Cherry blossom in spring. We even have a word ‘Momiji-gari‘. ‘Momiji‘ is a Japanese word for Japanese Maple and ‘Gari/Kari‘ means Hunting. Well, we do not hunt/harvest Maple leaves literally but it means that we go out to the countryside to enjoy the amazing view of mountains which are covered in various colours in yellow to red.
The most famous plant with the leaves in Autumn colour is ‘Momiji‘, Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum). I thought it represents beautiful Autumn the most so I made my version of it as a sweet.
Yes, we call the plant ‘Momiji‘ not ‘Emoji‘. Please don’t be confused. 😀
Sakura Junction 