green tea mochi ice cream with azuki beans

Tags

azuki beans, cream, dessert, flutinous rice flour, green tea, green tea cream, green tea ice cream, green tea mochi, green tea mochi ice cream, green tea mochi ice cream with azuki beans, japan, japanese desserts, mochi, red beans

Truthfully I’m not a great fan of mochi, I do like the Chinese mua zhee (glutinous rice flour cakes tossed in sugar and peanuts) as well as tang yuan (glutinous rice flour balls boiled in a pandan,ginger and sugar syrup), but otherwise mochi and mochi ice cream were never really far up my list of cravings.

These days the trend is mochi ice cream. I never understood it. The mochi is hard and chewy and the ice cream just didn’t seem to go well with it. And then I tried “Mochi sweets” in Kuala Lumpur. Now THIS is good mochi. It isn’t exactly mochi ice cream, its more of a mochi with cream inside I think. They’ve got everything down perfect, from the mochi, to the temperature it has to be consumed, to the ratio of mochi to fillings.

Now I thought I’d try to replicate it, but I still have some ways to go instead of the actual measurements, because I eyeballed the amount of cream and red bean used in each mochi T____T. Pleased with the way the mochi turned out, soft, smooth and chewy and super easy to make. In fact you can just use this mochi recipe and create your own fillings 😉

Ingredients

For mochi:

1 cup Glutinous rice flour
200ml water (room temperature is fine)
2 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tbsp green tea
pinch of salt

For the fillings:

canned azuki beans (You can boil your own red beans in some sugar and water but this is so much more convenient!)
2 tbsp sugar (or more if you like the cream to be sweeter)
1 1/2 tbsp green tea
200ml cream
pinch of salt

Instructions

It is advisable to do the fillings first. To prepare the cream , pour the cream into a mixing bowl, add the sugar and green tea and blend with a blender until stiff peaks form.

Using a teaspoon, place some cream onto the centres of small squares of cling wrap. Twist the loose ends so you’ll end up with this:-

The whole point is to create balls of cream and place them in the freezer. It is so much easier to handle frozen cream as it doesn’t ooze out of the mochi as easily. So into the freezer it goes for about an hour or until it has completely hardened up.
Next, place the azuki beans in a blender and add the salt

Blend into a chunky paste. If you’d like the paste to be smoother then just blend it a little longer. Set aside until you’re ready to make your mochi.

Now to proceed to the mochi. Place the flour, green tea and sugar into a bowl and mix to combine
Add water slowly, and stir into the flour using a rubber spatula

Make sure that there are no lumps in the mixture

Cover the bowl loosely (don’t cover it completely!) with some cling wrap.
Microwave the mixture for 1 minute at 1000watt. Remove the bowl from the microwave and stir the mixture before covering the bowl (loosely) again with the cling wrap and microwaving it for another 1 minute at 1000 watt.
You should get the following end result:

Prepare a tray and dust it with potato starch.
Scrape the mochi mixture onto the potato starch and sprinkle more potato starch on top of the mochi

Remember to put enough potato starch on the surface so it doesn’t stick to your hands. Flatten the mochi down and cut into 12 equal pieces.

Take one piece of mochi and cover the rest with cling wrap to keep it from going dry
Here’s where you can experiment with the proportions! Once you’ve pulled the mochi to your desired thickness, brush off the excess flour from the mochi, otherwise it’s going to be pretty hard getting it to stick and close up after adding the filling later on.
Add a dollop of red bean paste to the mochi and top with a chunk of frozen cream. Add more red bean paste on top and close up the mochi, making sure none of the red bean and cream spills out. Then you can gently pat the mochi into shape with the help of some potato starch. Place the mochi into the freezer.
Repeat with the other pieces of mochi.
The below method of placing the filling in the middle of a round circle and attempting to close it up from there was pretty messy! I preferred pressing the mochi out into a longer strip, and placing the red bean and cream on one end and I’d fold the other end on top and seal the edges that way before arranging it into a round shape.

Before serving, remove the mochi from the freezer to sit at room temperature for 15 minutes. This allows the mochi to get back into a soft and chewy, rather than a rubbery texture, while still allowing for the cream to be somewhat like an ice cream. If you prefer it as a cream then just leave it for 20-25 minutes or so 😉