Japanese cooking class in Duesseldorf ~ Oyatsu

On saturday I visited a cooking class in Duesseldorf City, the topic was Oyatsu ~ Japanese summer sweets ^o^

So totally my cup of tea! I love (Japanese) sweets but especially Japanese sweets are hard to make or it's really different from baking a normal cake or so. So I was pretty excited what we would do that day.

The teacher prepared four recipes for us: strawberry softcream (that's not Japanese, but they love it as well *lol*), Melonpan & Anpan (sweets buns), Yatsuhashi (sweets made of sticky rice flour) and Milk-Kan (kind of Jelly pudding).

We were splitted in groups and started to work. The kitchen room was really nice though it was unfavourable that it hadn't got a microwave and a water boiler.

I was in the group for the buns because I like them the most and in the past I failed in making them properly. Everyone worked together very well so we were working good on time.

the kitchen

The only bad thing was that our teacher didn't hand out the recipes, just the list of incredits. So every group had to ask her for the different steps and I spend much time writing everything down^^'

But everyone helped with filling the Yatsuhashi and forming (and filling) the buns. Unfortunately we made too much pastry for the Yatsuhashi and some buns didn't stay in form during the baking process, they looked more like a pizza but the taste was pretty good nevertheless.

We had some sticky rice flour, milk and sweet red beans left, so our teacher made spontaniously a rice pancake out of it, Just putting flour, milk and sugar together she made a real good pancake. The sweet beans were added in the pan and baked into the pancake.

The results were really delicious:

Yatsuhashi with red bean filling and cinnamon

Anpan (buns with red bean filling)

Milk-Kan with oranges

 (sorry, I don't get why blogger turns my pictures >.<)

Finally it was time for tasting/eating ^o^

the table full of sweets *o*

It was really good and all the people were quite nice. Only one woman had to leave earlier and couldn't stay till now. Unfortunately she - who was in charge of making the strawberry softcream - hadn't put it in the freezer but only in the fridge... so we just had a kind of cold strawberry drink^^'

Many things were left over so everyone could take some of the sweets home^^

But the cleaning of everything was also quite hard work X.x
And I must say if I have to work alone, the buns and the yatsuhashi are really time-robbing, it won't be worth doing it. So I don't think I will make these things in the near future.

But it was a nice class and I had a good and tasty day^__^