My kids love this very simple Japanese sweet treat they can’t get enough of it, Mochi is glutinous rice cake, it’s very simple and very light especially if you use green tea or just water instead of coconut milk.
(Mochi is quite similar to espasol – Filipino native delicacy made of toasted glutinous rice flour and coconut milk, so yummy!)
Traditional mochi is hard to make, the glutinous rice is soaked overnight , then it’s cooked, pounded it and shaped.. whew!
Thank goodness for glutinous rice flour making mochi is now a lot easier and doable at home and you can make it in different flavors, too.
I’ve tried green tea, coconut, pandan, strawberry, ube, you can even make layer different flavors together, I got the inspiration from sapin-sapin ( another Filipino delicacy) as you can see from photo above, I tried it too but I’m not good at it ..next time I’ll try coffee! 🙂
The recipe below is baked mochi but you can also steam it or put in in the microwave.
this batch is quite is dry, I over-cooked it 😐 but it’s still chewy 🙂 I used to cut it bigger than these but..
My 5-year old like mochi so much, he doesn’t bother to bite it, he just put the whole thing in his mouth; I’m scared that he’ll choke on it because it’s quite chewy so I started cutting it into little squares/bites.
I told him to eat it one at a time, slowly and with feelings .. 😄
♥ Have a nice day!! 🙂 Let’s continue to pray for Japan in light of what happened ..God Bless! ♥
Mochi Bites (Japanese Sweet Rice Cake)
Ingredients
- 2 cups Glutinous rice flour (8 oz)
- 1 ¼ cups Sugar white, brown, muscovado or coconut sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
- ¾ cup Water
- ½ teaspoon Vanilla Extract
- 1 cup Coconut Milk or green tea
- 1 teaspoon Food color and/or flavor pandan or ube food flavor, (optional)
- ¼ cup Rice flour toasted; for dusting
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
- Grease a 8-inch square pan with coconut oil or butter
- Whisk together the glutinous rice flour, sugar and baking powder, set aside.
- In a medium bowl, mix water, vanilla, coconut milk and food color / flavor.
- Mix into the glutinous rice flour mixture.
- Pour into the prepared pan.
- Cover the pan with foil and bake for 35-40 minutes. Let mochi cool completely
- Heat a pan over medium heat; add the rice flour and toast for about 5 minutes until lightly browned. Keep on stirring so rice flour will not burn
- dust a cutting board or a clean surface with toasted rice flour, put the remaining flour in a small bowl or plate and set aside.
- Turn mochi onto the rice flour-dusted cutting board or surface
- Cut into bite size pieces; use a plastic knife or dough cutter dusted with rice flour
- Roll the bite-size pieces of mochi in toasted rice flour. Serve with tea or coffee.