Drop one into hot coffee and it surfaces: head up, both front paws over the rim of the liquid, looking at you. Then it slowly stops doing that.

Yawahada is a marshmallow specialist, and that is not a marketing line — the entire shop is marshmallows. Cats, shiba inu, a “HOUSE!” set, cinnamon, Gudetama the lazy egg. The CafeCat box holds two cats and four cat-paw marshmallows, two vanilla and two chocolate, in a box 16.5 by 12.5 by 4 centimetres, for ¥972 with the ribbon and ¥864 without.

Every face is drawn by hand, so no two expressions match — which is the detail that turns a novelty into something you look at before you drink it. The shop adds one better thing on top: very occasionally a cat comes out of the mould entirely white, with no face at all, and whoever finds one is, in their words, very lucky. Nobody is manufacturing that scarcity. It is a hand-made confection with a hand-made failure rate, and they have decided to call the failures lucky.

The chocolate paw pads are not decoration either. Dropped into coffee they turn the cup into something close to a café mocha, and the shop suggests tea or soy milk as well, with the caveat that you should dial back the sugar accordingly. They also say, up front and without being asked, that air bubbles sometimes leave holes or hairline cracks in the marshmallow because of how it is made. A shop that volunteers its own cosmetic defects is a shop worth buying from.

The honest limitation is logistics, not the product. This is a small Japanese confectioner: the site is in Japanese, prices are in yen, dispatch takes three to seven working days, and the marshmallows keep for roughly ten to thirteen days somewhere cool and dark — refrigerated in summer. That is a short runway for an international order, and realistically this is something you buy while you are in Japan, or ask someone who is going. It is worth the ask. A cat that sits in your coffee with its paws up, drawn by a person who drew a slightly different one just before it, is a very high return on ¥972.