Wagashi Pix

This cookie-like confection is made with leftover bean skin, spun off from the process of producing red bean paste.
Ground red bean skin is mixed with light cookie dough and well baked until it gets hard enough just like a western crunchy nut cookie.
The outside is coated with high‐quality wasanbon sugar.

Ingredients:
Red bean, wheat flour, sugar, butter, wasanbon sugar, egg, salt, baking powder

Shop’s website:
Kameyayoshinaga’s homepage

Persimmon is very popular fruit that Japaneses often eat during the autumn season.

This confection Hohogaki has a slice of ripened persimmon covered with agar jelly inside.
It’s wrapped with a soft, glutinous pancake-like dough made from wheat and rice flour.

See more photos describing how Hohogaki is made.

Ingredients:
Japanese persimmon, egg, sugar, wheat flour, rice flour, vegetable oil, honey, agar, baking powder

Shop’s website:
Kameyayoshinaga’s homepage

These are special Kuzugashi that I got as the souvenirs of the exhibition of Kuniyoshi Utagawa.

Kuzugashi is a tiny candy-like confection that is simply made of sugar and kuzuko (kudzu starch).
It is molded into various shapes such as flowers, leaves, and vegetables.

Here is some pieces of Kuzugashi, as elaborate as Kuniyoshi Utagawa’s art!

Cats

A carp jumping up from the basin of a waterfall

Goldfish

Ripples of water

Mt.Fuji and the ocean

Chrysanthemum

Japanese maple leaves

Kuniyoshi Utagawa’s picture designed onto the beautiful box.

Ingredients:
Wasanbon sugar, kudzu starch

Ichigo (strawberry) daifuku is a new variation of daifuku, containing strawberry and sweet filling, most commonly anko, inside a small round rice cake. It is often eaten during winter or spring season.

Daifuku is well-known traditional Japanese sweet, but strawberry daifuku is kind of like a newcomer which was just invented in the 1980s. Although few people tend to take it as ‘improper’ wagashi, but it has already come to be very popular sweet for most of Japanese people.

Many patisseries claim to have invented the confection, so its exact origin is vague.

See another post about Ichigo (strawberry) daifuku.

Ingredients:
Sugar, red bean, rice flour, strawberry

Shop’s website:
Hachinoya’s homepage (Japanese)
Hachinoya’s homepage (English translated by Google)

Kurimushi Yokan is a popular Japanese confection for autumn season.
Sweet chestnuts are steamed with red bean paste in a square mold.
Just like Western cakes, it is cut into some pieces for serving.

Chestnut and red bean, such a delicious marriage!

Ingredients:Sugar, chestnut, red bean

Shop’s website:
Sentaro’s homepage (Japanese)
Sentaro’s homepage (English translated by Google)