An Ode to Seasonal Flowers
Ohana Floral Sweets
Story and photos by Anna Mindess
Mie Suzuki and her daughter Mana Hasegawa pay homage to the beauty of seasonal flowers in their Ohana Floral Sweets.
Should you find yourself in front of a table filled with sweets strikingly adorned with handcrafted carnations, sunflowers, cherry blossoms, cosmos, hydrangeas, and other blooms, you may have happened upon an Ohana Floral Sweets pop-up. The business was started in 2023 by Berkeley-based mother and daughter team Mie Suzuki and Mana Hasegawa. Their delicate mochi—glutinous rice flour treats—pay homage to seasonal flowers in both image and name. Ohana comes from hana, which means flower in Japanese. The “o” placed before it is a common honorific.
Mie Suzuki grew up in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, a northern seaside region known for its rice production. She trained as a nurse, but on a 1990 visit to see her sister in Berkeley, she fell in love, married, and stayed instead of returning to Japan.
With a passion for cooking, Suzuki found work making meals in El Cerrito elder-care homes where many residents were Japanese and appreciated her traditional home cooking. As the pandemic started, she wanted to help Japanese elders stuck at home, so she prepared bento boxes for them. She started adding mochi sweets like those she remembered from childhood, and her creations became so popular that she had to call on her daughter to help meet the demand. Hasegawa, who was working in a restaurant at the time, came to help her mother on her days off.
As the pandemic eased up, Suzuki continued making mochi balls, and her daughter, who had the same nostalgia for mochi, agreed that they could even try selling their creations.
As they developed a business plan, Suzuki started noticing a new trend on Japanese social media: People were adorning mochi balls with exquisite representations of seasonal flowers formed by piping sweet bean paste from pastry bags. She traveled to Tokyo for a 6-week class to master this skill, and her daughter followed suit, taking the same class later on.
“We make our mochi in the traditional way,” says Suzuki. “Everything from scratch, no shortcuts, buying everything fresh and local.” For example, it takes two days to make the white bean paste icing. Working in a shared kitchen space in downtown Berkeley, they soak the white lima beans overnight, peel away the skins one by one, boil the beans, squeeze the water out, and mix the paste with sugar. They also make a red bean paste icing. They fill their mochi with creams that incorporate flavors like matcha, raspberry, peach, roasted green tea, caramel, chocolate, pumpkin spice, and yuzu (the shards of zest create tiny bursts of flavor).
“It’s hard to find mochi made from scratch like this,” says Hasegawa, “but it tastes better.”
Ohana Floral Sweets are sold at Kamado Sushi and via occasional pop-ups at The Hidden Café and Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley, Yaoya-San grocery in El Cerrito, and ChaTo, a mother-daughter-owned tea store in SF Japantown. They also accept online orders. For a recent custom order placed by a dog lover, they created mochi balls with piped poodle heads. ♦
Anna Mindess is an award-winning journalist who writes on food, culture, and travel for numerous publications including the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Berkeleyside. Follow her on Instagram @annamindess and find her stories at annamindess.contently.com.
