Simple Joys in Life

On 11 Aug (Fri), we visited the Ishiya Chocolate Factory. When we see the tin containers with cat cartoons, we knew we wanted to get them at the end of our factory tour. We paid 1500 Yen for the admission to the factory and an opportunity to bake cookies. More about baking later!

It's interesting that they have a cat's paw prints to lead visitors around the factory.
Even the signs to the toilets have cat picture :)

The factory has displays like the following:
, expensive looking cups

We could also view the cookie making process:


We were wearing the hat and apron and baking in the room earlier like the Japanese families :)

While waiting for our cookies to be baked in the oven for about 30 mins, we explored the other sections of the factory. One section has toys on display:

We also went to the factory store and they have many types of cookies, chocolates and cakes in nice packaging:

As we were travelling on our own, we could only manage with getting some of Ishiya famous chocolate cookies for our families. The factory also sells these handmade cute shoes and girls:

And finally, we collected our cookies in shapes of heart, cat, rabbit and girl. I chose almond cookie dough while kuro.shiro.neko had the cocoa one. The cookie dough was already pre-prepared and all we had to do is to roll the dough and use the cookie cutters to get the cookie shapes we wanted out of the dough. It was easy at first as the dough could be stuck to the table surface or our cookie shapes became dismembered. hee. It was fun.

The gates and outside of the factory also have cute cat figures: