#koshi-an

[tattooed-alchemist]

Watch the incredible individual process of assembling wagashi.  There’s a huge production phase for a couple of days where all these doughs and bean pastes get made, and then there’s the super artful part where a confection is assembled, and this video is all artful assembly and plating.

And really importantly, it shows how that traditional, twig-like, eating implement actually gets used to eat wagashi!  I’ve used one a couple times really awkwardly, and it was nice to see it used with technique.

[tattooed-alchemist]

January wagashi from Tokara.

The pink mochi had a stretchy rice dough outer layer and the inside was shiro-an flavored with miso.

The brown kinton is a super-soft bean paste sieved to make threads, clumped around a ball of tsubu-an.

The rat mochi has a steamed rice dough outer layer, and the zodiac sign for the coming lunar year is branded on the surface with a wire branding iron.  The filling is koshi-an.

[tattooed-alchemist]

Wagashi by Tokara. 

Clockwise from top-left: Hydrangea, Baby Plum and Love Letter From A Bird.

Wagashi trivia: that little yellow bit is a puffed rice grain dyed with food coloring, which we would never have been guessed, @blacksunmagick and I seriously pondered, and then we just asked Tokara-san.