Hello everyone! Do you like eating sweets? Japan is not only offering you many beautiful and historical travel destination, but also delicious traditional sweets.

This time we will go to Mirakuan, a Japanese traditional sweets shop at Yugawara. Not only you can buy various seasonal confectionery for souvenir, but they are also opening sweets making workshop to try too! 

Sweets Making

Mirakuan open their sweets making class everyday at 10:30~11:30 a.m. and 02:00~03:00 p.m. (except Tuesday). You can click here to see their schedule. The sweets making class cost 1,300 JPY (tax not included) and you will make 2 types of confectionary depending on the season. You need to reserved and will probably do the workshop with other groups of people too. 1 group is maximum 40 person.

From the start you join the class, you will be asked to wash your hands and after get you still need to sterilize it with alcohol. I even admonished because I took my camera in the middle of the making process. Sorry I can’t provide you with a step by step picture, but at least here is the pictures of sweets I made! p(^v^)q

I made nerikiri-wagashi. Nerikiri is a type of Japanese traditional cake made from boiled rice flour mixed with white bean paste. The original color is white, but to make colorful flowers, food coloring was added. For the filling, we use anko or red bean paste. The sweets were so soft and it is the best to enjoy with a cup of tea. 

The type of sweets you made will change depending on the season. This time I made summer type flower. The purple one is called Fuji-no-hana (Japanese wisteria) and the Green-white one is Suzuran (Convallaria keiskei). We made it by kneading the dough by color order. To make Fuji-no-hana, we start kneading purple dough, then wrap it with white dough to get the pale purple color. Same thing for Suzuran, we knead the green dough, then wrapped it with white dough. Lastly, we add the pattern and do the final touch using the wooden tools.

After the making class, we were given plastic boxes to bring our sweets are souvenir~ Then, everyone had tea time together and we also ate the orange jam rice crackers.

Confectionary Art

After the sweets making class, take your time to go to the 2nd floor. Mirakuan are displaying many beautiful confectionary art. To think that all the beautiful object are made (more of less) the same ingredients with the sweets I just made earlier, it makes me think how skillful the maker hands. I just made 2 little sweets and it looks very clumsy (^~^) but the confectionary art on the second floor was big and in a very complicated shape as you can see on the pictures below.

-Vivi-

Information

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