I had a spell of glutinous rice fever, so here are two recipes for mochi which I've never tried before.
Mochi bread
I only had green flour in the house (coloured with pandan extract, it's better than putting food colouring in) so I headed to Mare Street to my nearest oriental supermarket, which is Vietnamese. I also ended up getting some flour mix for making Vietnamese crepes, so I'm going to try that some time soon. The mochi bread tasted really good - hard on the outside and sticky on the inside - although next time, I think I'd either make it more sweet by adding chocolate/sweetened red beans, or completely savory. Also, I think if I used brown sugar (or even the green flour) it would have looked much nicer, but I will reiterate the point I made earlier about unattractive looking food :)
Ingredients
100g glutinous rice flour (mochiko)
20g plain flour
1 tbsp soy flour or cheese powder (parmesan cheese or a fake equivalent will do)
1 tbsp milk
200ml water
40g sugar
1/2 tsp salt
30g butter
1 egg, beaten
Method
1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180C
2. Sieve the flours, cheese powder and baking soda into a bowl
3. In a saucepan, boil the water and add the salt and butter. Once the butter has melted, slowly add the mixture to the flour to form a dough.
4. Slowly stir in the milk and beaten egg. If the dough isn't moist enough, or there's still flour at the bottom of the bowl, add a bit of water or oil.
5. Shape into balls and place on a baking tray lined with baking parchment (the original recipe said something about using a piping bag, but it is completely unnecessary!)
6. Bake for 15-20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to gas mark 3/160C, and bake for a further 10 minutes.
Mochi ice cream
This is just normal mochi daifuku, but frozen with an ice cream filling inside. There are lots of recipes online for making mochi, but loads tell you to do it in a microwave...WHY?! It's so much easier on the stove, at least then you can tell when it's done, and you don't need to worry about it exploding, burning or drying up. I have done enough stupid stuff with microwaves on impulse so the risk of messing it up is pretty high for me.
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups glutinous rice flour (mochiko)
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup caster sugar
Lots of potato starch
food colouring and a splash of vanilla essence (optional)
ice cream
Method
1. First, thaw the ice cream so it is soft (but not runny). Mould into small, teaspoon size balls, and pop back into the freezer so they freeze fully again.
2. Combine the flour, water and sugar in a pan, and stir it a little.
3. Heat the mixture on a moderate heat and stir continuously. It will thicken and become gelatinous quite quickly, and will then stick together in a big lump and become difficult to stir.
4. At that point, transfer the mochi from the pan onto a surface or chopping board which has been dusted with potato starch.
5. Once the mochi has completely cooled, take the frozen ice cream balls out of the freezer. Use a small cookie cutter to cut out bits of mochi and mould it around the ice cream (you need to do this quickly, because the ice cream will start to melt). Make sure your hands are always covered in potato starch, otherwise it'll just stick everywhere and you'll end up with a mess.
6. Transfer to the freezer and wait until the ice cream has frozen completely before eating. If the ice cream melts before you have time to pop them in the freezer, your mochi will be flat, but it isn't that much of a big deal.
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I found this and figured the reason it was unpublished was because I never took any photos of the ugly mochi ice cream and uglier mochi bread. Whoops. I did, however, find a photo of the Vietnamese pancakes (Banh xeo) I made, which were also pretty ugly, so still appropriate for this post, I think.
If you would like to try making this ugly pancake, there's a decent recipe here. Resist the temptation to be sparing with the oil (if you tend to do that) as otherwise the pancakes won't be crispy!
Hope you enjoyed this ugly post.
