Jiggly Japanese Water Cake Looks Like a Little Glass Cat

For years, the Kinseiken Seika Company has been perfecting the sugary-sweet art of making desserts. Located in Hokuto, Japan, the shop is renowned for its experimental approach to mochi, a sweetened rice cake. In 2014, the company’s popularity soared when the sweet-toothed Internet discovered its mizu shingen mochi, Japanese water cake. Based on the classic shingen mochi dish, mizu shingen mochi is a gelatinous cake that bears a striking resemblance to an oversized dewdrop. Inspired by the delicate dessert, Twitter user @mithiruka has recently recreated it—but with a fun and fancy feline twist.

Like shingen mochi, the Japanese water cake is composed of three main ingredients: a gyuhi base (a softer and more delicate breed of mochi), a sticky-sweet brown sugar syrup coating, and a dusting of kinako soybean powder. Unlike the traditional rice cake, however, mizu shingen mochi has an additional additive: crystal clear water collected from Japan’s Southern Alps. The extracted water has been solidified <emjust enough to give the mystifying, melt-in-your-mouth mochi its bouncy shape—which means that, if not consumed quickly (around 30 minutes), the quirky creation will begin to liquefy. Even with its strikingly short shelf life, however, @mithiruka has opted to craft an edible work of art out of the ephemeral treat.

Unlike Kinseiken’s water cake, @mithiruka’s reimagined version no longer resembles a simple, spherical bead of water. Instead, it looks like a curled up, crystalline cat. Using a recipe from Cookpad and a silicon mold of a slumbering cat, the dessert-loving Twitter user managed to put a unique spin on an already inventive sweet.