Hawaiian Butter Mochi
I then proceeded to spend 5 mins standing at an Asian grocery store going, "damn, it's a pity they only stock glutinous rice flour instead of mochi flour" before my dumbass remembered what's what.
For the recipe, I used Genevieve Ko's one with two small changes:
- I didn't have coconut milk, only coconut cream, so I added 50% water by cream volume and recalculated the rest of the ratios
- I cut the sugar by 33% and removed the sugar glazing. I tend to see SEA, American, and British dishes as being overly sweet and I was very much right to cut the sugar down.
**Hey so, you should make this because *people ate this up***. I had six girls over for late night chats and they devoured the entire pan. Everyone went for the side slices first because the crust is rightfully the most amazing part of this dish. The coconut flavour's not too strong, and the mochi texture and the contrast between the baked edges and the soft, gooey middle is irresistable.
I will say that for a 'butter' mochi, there was surprisingly little butter by volume used. I wonder why it's not called coconut mochi instead?
The last thing of note is that @Renkon said that their memory of a butter mochi is closer to a brownie or a cake, but all the recipes I found emphasized the chewy mochi texture. Certainly, the version I made by Genevieve Ko was very mochi. Far softer than dango. I also felt that my butter mochi could've been taken out of the oven at 50 minutes instead of 1 hr and 15, but I did the full time anyway since I was curious and it was hard to properly gauge the done-ness. At 50 mins, the criteria had already been met--that is, you press the mochi and it bounces back. And yet, the full 1 hr and 15 minute bake time didn't feel overbaked at all; one might even say that anything past 2 cms from the edges of the brownie pan were still extremely soft and might've been baked a bit longer. My personal judgment is that the edges were a bit overbaked, but none of the girls that came felt that way. They enjoyed the heavy contrast.
Everyone went back for a second or third slice. This might be the fastest any of my dessert's been consumed. They agreed with me on sweetness though--and were glad I cut down on the sugar.
Seriously, I would not do the sugar glaze in that recipe video. That's so overkill on sweetness. The crispy top that everyone loved would've been soaked wet by the glaze as well.