In April and May last year I attended two very different cultural classes. The first, on April 26th, was a cooking class to make the classic British treat, the Battenburg Cake. Then around three weeks later, on May 17th, I attended an Ikebana class. That’s the Japanese tradition of flower arranging.
First, as I said, in late April last year, I attended a cooking class to learn how to make the incredibly involved Battenburg Cake. In the middle of Tokyo, there is a bakery owned by a British lady. It’s called Mornington Crescent. She primarily runs cooking classes there, but also, once a month, she hosts an open bakery where she bakes up loads of goodies and sells them from 11am until she is sold out. I went to ones of her classes the year before with Shyam and another friend. We made scones that time. I asked her then about Battenburg classes and she told me she held them once a year. So I kept my eye on her website for several months and finally the class appeared and I quickly signed up.
The class size was limited to six, and when I arrived I realised I was the only non-Japanese participant. I immediately felt a little bad as the classes can be done in English, Japanese, or both, depending on the participants, and with my presence she had to do English too. But of course she was fine with it and, I think, enjoyed being able to share some British anecdotes. She demonstrated what to do in the the kitchen area, and then we worked, in pairs, in the front shop area.
So the basic process was making the sponge first. Of course you have to make a yellow sponge and a pink sponge, which is why we were working in pairs. When she demonstrated she kind of awkwardly made a partition in the pan to bake the pink and yellow sponges side-by-side, but she said making two at a time in two different pans was much easier. As the sponges baked, we then got the delightful job of making the marzipan. This was tedious and I would not recommend, lol. In fact, when I made Battenburg at mum’s last summer, we cheated and bought readymade marzipan, lol. Basically there is a whole lot of regimented stirring involved and having to get the mixture at a certain temperature. The lady I was paired with was a bit older and a bit stuck in her way of doing things too, so it was kind of hard.
Once the marzipan was finished and the sponges baked, they were left to cool. We took the opportunity to have a tea break and sample what we were making (a classic here’s one I made earlier’ trick). It was delicious and the tea was so refreshing after the torrid time we’d had with the marzipan.
After the cake and tea was gone, it was back to work. It was time to assemble the cake! We had to cut the sponges and arrange them in the right way to make the classic checked pattern. Then we had to glue them together with apricot jam. Very messy! After that it got even messier! We had to coat the sponges in jam and then carefully wrap the marzipan all the way around. It was difficult! But I just about managed it. It didn’t look as neat as the one I’d just eaten from at the tea break, but it was definitely passable.
We wrapped our cakes up in clingfilm and put them in boxes to take home. If anyone has had a shop bought Battenburg before, just know that these ones are huge in comparison! Enough to feed about ten people probably. We all thanked our teacher very much and happily marched out with our gigantic cakes after a fun few hours.
Okay, so part one was a very British experience (though primarily taught in Japanese, lol). Part 2 is a Japanese experience primarily taught in English, haha. The area where I live has a nice community spirit. It has a big foreigner presence, so there are a lot of English language initiatives. This Ikebana experience was one such of these. It was a heavily subsidized class (usually Ikebana classes can be quite expensive to attend), so I felt very lucky to be able to participate.
It was held in a community space only 15 minutes walk from my apartment. I arrived in good time and found out I was part of group A. There were two groups and one would do whilst the other watched and then swap over. So I was in the group that would do the flower arranging first. We had a professional Japanese Ikebana lady there to show us what to do, plus many volunteers helping. I found this class kind of hard too. I don’t have the greenest fingers in the world, so cutting stems and choosing flowers, etc. felt very foreign to me. We watched her demonstration first and then we got stuck in at our own work benches.
Ikebana is basically about choosing your centerpieces (the flowers), angling them in the way you want, and then adding the greenery around them. It is definitely something that takes a lot of practice to get good at, I think. We all had a fair bit of help constructing our pieces. But it was super fun to see what everybody came up with. After we finished, they helped us take some fairly professional photos of our pieces. I was pretty happy with how mine turned out.
We then switched over to the B group. I then got to just amble around, looking at what they were doing. They had different flowers to us, so it was interesting to see the new designs they all came up with.
After they finished, we did a little survey thing at the end. Then they wrapped everyone’s flowers to take home. It unfortunately did not look nearly as pretty squished into the vase I have here, haha. But I really enjoyed the experience and recommend everyone to try Ikebana if they can.
A year in Japan 