Camelia

Photo

Recipe

1. Make Uiro-Wrapped Balls.
2. Color the balls a gentle pink.
   1. (We used the fuschia color from our gel food coloring set).
3. Wrap the uiro around 20g shiro-an.
4. Make the indentation.
   1. Wet a piece of sarashi, then cover the top of the ball with the sarashi.
   2. Using your pinky, push through the sarashi into the ball slightly biased toward the front. It should look like the flower is opening up to you.
5. Fully cover the now-indented ball in Koori-mochi.
   1. Be sure to use very finely-ground koori-mochi. Using a mortar and pestle works well here. I passed the ground powder through a sieve to catch any big chunks and get a uniform output. (Used the wide-mesh big sieve, the cheap big one that lives in the lazy susan).
   2. Putting the koori-mochi in a small dish, then rolling the ball in the dish, works great.
   3. Use a small pinch of the dust to intentionally fill in the indentation. (It won’t fill on its own).
6. Handling the now-covered ball as little as possible, place a small ball of yellow-colored konashi into the indentation.
   1. Touching the koori-mochi makes it flatten and look bad. It loses its nice organic fluffiness.

Notes:

• I used our grey sauce dish thing (slightly larger than the clear glass containers we use for tea) to roll the balls around in. It was sufficiently aggressive that it caused the indentation to close up a little bit while rolling around. Just keep that in mind while pressing the original indentation.

Photos from other angles:

Attempts

2026-01-02

• Heated full batch of Uiro for 22 minutes at around 5.5 on the burner. (There’s a wide range where the heat is about the same from 4-5, then it picks up very quickly. This was a bit after it picked up, so medium-high but on the higher side.) Worked great. Never do anything else.
• Dried the anko too much.
  • Usually it comes out too wet, because I’m keeping my hands wet when I’m working with the uiro. So, I went way drier than I wanted in the hopes that it would moisten after working with it.
  • I’m writing this just after finishing making them, so it remains to be seen if the moisture the next day turns out good.
  • However, there was a distinct big problem with the dryness during forming. Because the anko was too dry, it held its shape way too firmly. When I tried gently rounding it out, etc etc, it just kept its lumpy shape exactly as it was when I wrapped it. That was awful. It really needs to be softer so it can shape better. Which brings me to my next point…
• Indent more.
  • If you indent it until it looks nice on its own, that is not enough. You’re going to be adding a ball of konashi on top, which is going to completely change the balance.
  • You need to indent way more than you think you need (deeper, not necessarily wider) to leave room for the ball.
• Gently dabbing the ball in water before placing it onto the uiro works great.

Koori-mochi coating tips:

• Confirmed that yes, you want to use finely-ground koori-mochi.
• Koori-mochi is robust against the uiro being really wet when you put it in to coat.
  • This means that you should thoroughly wet your hands before taking the uiro ball off the tray and placing it into the koori-mochi.
  • If you don’t do this, and you get stretch marks from where you accidentally touched the uiro with dry hands and had to pull away, you will notice that after applying koori-mochi.