Butter Mochi

I pulled this recipe out this summer to make with the young cooks at the Brooklyn Apple Academy Run a Luncheonette Cooking Camp for our Asian inspired menu. Butter Mochi is a Japanese American treat that I ate and adored as a child growing up in Hawaii. I was very excited to share this recipe with my students and they loved it!

Folks, this stuff is good. It’s a cross between a custard and a cake made with mochiko rice flour. It tastes like butterscotch. It’s also very, very easy to make. I used to make Butter Mochi often, but I decided at some point to try to forget that I knew how to make it. Butter Mochi is so good that when it’s around, I will eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. I’m pretty sure that Butter Mochi was solely responsible for a spike in my weight in my mid twenties.

Toward the end of the end of my mid-twenties butter mochi binge, I tried making it with less sugar in some sort of sad attempt to make it more healthy. This summer, I made it with all the sugar with my students at cooking camp and then again with reduced sugar when I visited my mother in Canada. It really is better with ALL the sugar. I’ve decided that a better solution to my mochi self control problem is just to make it smaller batches. Here is a recipe for a manageable amount of butter mochi.

BUTTER MOCHI

1/4 cup melted butter plus extra to grease the pan
2 cups mochiko plus extra to dust the pan
1 and 1/4 cup white granulated sugar
2 cups milk
2 eggs
1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Grease the bottom and sides of an 8×8 baking pan. Dust the bottom and sides of the pan with mochiko flour.
Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl and mix until there are no lumps. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour.