Chrysanthemum White Bean Paste Nerikiri Cake

This lovely chrysanthemum flower is actually an edible treat!  It’s a Japanese sweet treat known as nerikiri and is simply made with white bean paste.  We’ve previously made a super cute Easter Bunny nerikiri with white bean paste and it was super fun as well as delicious.  

We’ve made a Chrysanthemum White Bean Paste Nerikiri Cake this time in the same way, just in time for the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節.  Chrysanthemums bloom in the fall and are traditionally used as a background to gleaming mooncakes and flowered filled osmanthus jellies that celebrate the festival.   Today the chrysanthemum leads the way as a delicate, gorgeous to look at and yummilicious to eat treat. What a revelation!

White Bean Paste Dough | Nerikiri

This innocuous looking piece of dough is much more interesting than it looks.   This, dear readers, is the not really famous but totally should be famous Japanese white bean paste dough.  Also known as White Bean Paste Nerikiri Dough.

This versatile dough made of white bean paste and mochi becomes an edible dessert 'clay' with which you can make so many yummilicious as well as gorgeously shaped and textured sweet desserts.  It's amazing, really, the wonderful shapes that can be made: flowers, leaves, pumpkins, animals, etc.  The limit is your imagination and ingenuity.

White Bean Paste Nerikiri Bunny

It's time for Easter and we're letting the bunnies out!  We recently discovered and have been exploring 'white bean paste', a mild sweet bean paste that turns out to be very versatile in the making of all kinds of desserts.  Check out our first dessert made with white bean paste, our Chocolate Raspberry Tang Yuan, so yummy!

We've pushed on exploring white bean paste and discovered the wonderful things that the Japanese have done with it.  Namely they have made white bean paste into an edible "clay" or "dough" that can then be modeled and shaped into all kinds of amazing little sweet treats called "nerikiri" or "nerikiri wagashi."

Our first try at making and shaping a "nerikiri" was to make this simple bunny in time for Easter celebration.  We were all delighted by the results.  Our White Bean Paste Nerikiri Bunny turned out super duper cute, with soft white fur and little pink ears, twinkly black eyes and a round fluffy tail.  Bunny's all ready for some Easter fun!

Homemade White Bean Paste 白豆沙餡

Up until recently I had never heard of white bean paste 白豆沙.  Red bean paste 紅豆沙, yes, and how I love the flavor of it.  But never white bean paste.  It turns out that white bean paste is really quite lovely, with the same fine creamy texture of red bean paste but having a milder sweet creamy flavor that's perfect for stuffing a Chinese pastry.

In Japan white bean paste is used for many desserts and is known as 'Shiro-an.'

We needed white bean paste to make chocolate paste filling for our raspberry chocolate tang yuan 覆盆子巧克力湯圓.  So yummilicious!   And even more exciting is that we realized that white bean paste, with its mild sweet flavor and light color, can be used as a base for all kinds of innovative fillings in Chinese pastries.  

In other words: White bean paste + added flavor = exciting new flavor !