Christmas sweets to take away

Like for every season, you can find seasonal sweets over Christmas as well. As I am always very eager to try them out, I have already tried a few in Japan and can report my experience. In this post, I will talk about sweets you can buy to takeaway and enjoy at home.

Japanese Wagashi in Christmas Style

Wagashi are traditional Japanese sweets that are made from rice flour and filled with anko. Usually, they are shaped like flowers and leaves to represent the current season, but nowadays you can find all sorts of wagashi, like Halloween-themed wagashi, wagashi that look like Hello Kitty, and of course Christmas-themed wagashi.

I found these two in the Daimaru Shopping Center at Tokyo station. You can probably find similar treats in most stores that sell wagashi. One of these sweets costs just over 400 yen, so they were not cheap.

I think that they look really nice, but in the end, wagashi usually taste the same no matter how they look because they all are made of rice flour and filled with anko. If you are looking for a difference in taste, you should look for wagashi with a different filling (than anko) instead. Nevertheless, these wagashi tasted really good and were nice to look at.

Christmas Cake from Quatre Quarts

A lot of Japanese patisserie stores also start selling Christmas-themed cakes in December. Usually, you can find small cakes that look like Santa Clause or a snowman. In a store of the patisserie chain Quatre Quarts I found this cake which was called "Crystal" and is probably inspired by a snow crystal. It costs about 600 yen.

The cake is made of white chocolate mousse and filled with vanilla cream - not necessarily very Christmassy flavors but I really liked the taste. I buy from this patisserie quite a lot because the cakes look cute and also taste nice. This chain has several shops in the western area of Tokyo.

Besides the smaller cakes at most patisserie stores in Japan, you can usually also reserve bigger cakes that you can either pick up or that will be delivered to your door shortly before Christmas.

Christmas chocolate from Godiva

Most famous chocolate makers also will have a special Christmas collection in December. I tried this small box from Godiva that contains 4 pieces of chocolate. It was around 1,300 yen which is rather expensive for chocolate. It should be available in all Godiva shops and in their online store.

The set contained a piece of dark chocolate and a piece of almond chocolate that tasted as I would have expected. The star-shaped chocolate was filled with walnuts and had honey and ginger flavors that made it feel like a Christmas chocolate. The little snowman was white chocolate with hazelnut filling. This chocolate can come in different designs.

All in all, it did taste good and came with some interesting flavors but considering the price, I would probably not buy it again.

Have you tried any Christmas Sweets so far? Do you prefer the Christmas Sweets from your home country over the Japanese ones?