Coconut Mochi cake

I’ve been wanting to use my new Nordic Ware Chrysanthemum Bundt Pan for a while now.  I was trying to find the perfect cake to make it with.  Then I came across this coconut mochi cake recipe by Une-Deux Senses, that I actually found a while back, and forgot about.  I’ve never made a mochi bundt cake before, but I wanted to try it out.

At first, I was a bit worried with the recipe I saw.  It was very similar to the base recipe I have used to create my mochi cakes, but it also added an additional can of coconut milk and some water, without removing the evaporated milk that is usually in the base.  It seemed like too many liquids!

I followed the recipe as is, and it was very, very liquidy.  But I hoped for the best, and an hour later, my cake came out.  I love my nordic ware bundt.  I remember the old days, when it would take me forever to get a cake out of a bundt.  A lot of banging, coaxing, knifing around the edges.  But since discovering Nordic Ware, baking bundts has become so much easier.  My cake slid right out like water.  And all the beautiful little petal designs came out perfectly.

I think the cake didn’t have much of a coconut taste.  It was super chewy. It was definitely more mochi than cake, whereas the past ones I’ve baked are more of a mix of a cake and mochi.  I liked it, but thought it was a bit weird to be eating the mochi like a slice of cake, and it took a while to chew and finish.  My favorite part was the top layer that got brown from the pan.  It was harder and chewier, kind like the edge of brownies. Boyfriend liked that part the best too.

Ingredients

1 stick butter, melted
2 tsp. vanilla
2 cups sugar
4 eggs, beaten
2 tsp. baking powder
16 oz. box Mochiko flour
12 oz. can evaporated milk
1/2 cup water
13.5 oz. can coconut milk

Directions

1. Beat eggs and sugar together.  Add vanilla, butter, evaporated milk, coconut milk and water.  Add in mochiko flour and baking powder.

2. Pour mixture into bundt pan

3. Put in a 350 F oven for an hour, until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

4. Cool completely before serving.

I know that you don’t usually see powdered sugar on mochi, but the cake was begging for a dusting of powdered sugar, so I put it on anyway.

Mitsuwa Marketplace- Mochi store

Mitsuwa Marketplace
675 Saratoga Avenue
San Jose, CA 95129
(408) 255-6699
www.mitsuwa.com/

When I was at my parents, my friend told me that the Mitsuwa in San Jose now has a mochi store inside.  A mochi store?? Of course I had to check it out.  Right inside Mitsuwa is a section selling elegant mochi, manju and some other Japanese desserts.  They were so pretty, but oh so expensive!

After visiting Hogetsu, with their pretty manju and mochi priced at only $1, it was really hard to justify spending $4+ for a piece of mochi.  (There were some that were around $2, but all the ones I wanted to try were more.) Another interesting thing I noticed was how much they charge for the box!  Buying the mochi individually is cheaper than buying a box of the same mochi. 

They did allow my brother to snap pictures of everything though.  I was there for quite a while wondering if I should buy some.  In the end, I didn't end up buying any though.

These ones were probably the cheapest:

These ones were some of the most expensive. It looked pretty cool.  The outside is a dried persimmon and the inside is stuffed with white bean paste.

There were quite a few that had multiple layers, which I really liked.  I don't think my brother got photos of those.  Here are some more pictures he took:

Korean dumplings

Green is one of my favorite colors.  (I often wonder if my love of green tea is based in large part on my love for the color green.)  Lately, when shopping at the Korean market Zion, I've noticed they offer a lot of food colored green with chlorophyll: green noodles, green dumplings, etc.

I already love dumplings, and seeing them in green make them look even more appealing to me.  Zion has been giving samples of their green dumplings on my last few visits and I decided to buy some.  I'm usually not too crazy about frozen dumplings.  I prefer the taste of homemade ones.  But I enjoyed the ones sold at Zion (maybe the green color added to its appeal).  After cooking them, I thought they were so pretty that I had to snap a picture.

Chinese New Years is coming soon, and I plan on making some homemade
chinese dumplings as part of my yearly tradition, which I will be
blogging about!