Aika Renzo wants people to think “Japanese sweets” when they think “Wagashi Japanese Bakery.”
“‘Wagashi,’ in the literal translation, does mean ‘Japanese sweets,’ but it’s more than that,” says Renzo, 29, owner/baker of Wagashi Japanese Bakery.
They’re Japanese desserts that can be made of mochi, which is a glutinous rice flour, or red bean paste. “Traditional confections usually eaten during tea ceremonies or eaten with tea in general.”
Renzo, who operates her business out of her home, grew up eating the type of traditional Japanese sweets she makes. “I am a Memphis native, but I am half Japanese and my dad is from Memphis and he is Black. So, I grew up with two different cultures.”
She would visit Osaka, where her mother is from, eat the food there, and surround herself with the culture.
Renzo always missed the cuisine when she returned to Memphis. “Now that I have kids, that’s something I want them to grow up and love. Something as simple as Japanese homemade sweets I want my kids to grow up with and share with their friends. Something I never had in Memphis.
“There is no homemade Japanese bakery around, as far as I know. It’s a good type of bakery to have. We have all sorts of shops here — French pastries, croissants, and doughnuts — but we don’t have a traditional Japanese bakery. And that’s a gap I want to fill.
“I’m a self-taught baker, so I kind of taste and experiment with different recipes and mold it into what I grew up with and how I remember that nostalgic taste.”
Renzo’s first baking effort was “the classic” chocolate chip cookie. “The quintessential American cookie.”
She used a mix out of a box, but she didn’t find that satisfying. She wanted to express her creativity. “Baking anything where you’re creating is an art that comes from the heart. I know that’s corny, but it’s something you feel and you put out for everyone to experience.”
The first Japanese dessert she made was melonpan — “a Japanese sweet bread that has a cookie crunchy crust scored to look like the skin of muskmelon.”
It didn’t start out as melonpan. Renzo was making bread from a general recipe when she thought, “What if I turn this into melonpan?”
It’s like a “fluffy bread with cookie crust on top. I just kind of tweaked it with spices I attributed to my childhood taste buds of eating melonpan.”
And, she says, “I do have a special sugar I use that kind of gives it that special flair. It also has a nice coating of sugar. It’s dipped in sugar once it’s scored.”
Melonpan is “essentially more like a biscuit in the English sense.”
She let her mother try it. “She loved it. I even think she might have cried the first time she ate it because it reminded her of her childhood.”
Renzo, who officially opened her Wagashi Japanese Bakery website last November, offers melonpan in its original flavor as well as matcha flavored, which is “just green tea flavor.”
She also sells “Castella cake,” which, she says, is “essentially like a Japanese-style sponge cake. It has a honey soak on it, which gives it that moisture. But it’s made with bread flour, so it’s springy. A lot of people tell me the texture is very similar to pound cake, but way lighter.
“It’s a pretty common Japanese cake. It’s usually in a rectangular block and lined with parchment on the bottom to keep that honey soak.”
Renzo also bakes “matcha mochi bars.” “These are not traditional, but something I wanted to add to the menu just to give people other options.”
Since they sort of have the texture of a brownie, Renzo refers to them as “a Japanese mochi blondie.”
As for a brick-and-mortar storefront, Renzo says, “I don’t really see it happening in the near future. Maybe within a year or two just depending on what life throws at us.
“I would love to have it be a bakery and also a tea house. The variations would be, we would primarily serve green tea or traditional Japanese tea. Because wagashi in the general sense is eaten during tea ceremonies or special events with tea or green tea.”
Renzo wants to pair the two so people will “get the full experience. We have a lot of bubble tea places and Asian restaurants, but I want to focus more on the traditional pairing that you would see in Japan.”
To order, Renzo says, “You can go online to our website — wagashibakery.com. You can place your order online at least 24 hours in advance, so we can bake those to order. And we deliver free anywhere only in the Shelby County area.”