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Hello and welcome back to the Cupcake Gemma channel with me, Gemma. I'm at home. It's boiling hot. There's a bit of a heat wave going on. And today I'm going to make one of my favorite sweet treats. That is mochi, which is a Japanese rice cake. There's lots of different kinds, but the one that I'm most familiar with is the kind of ice cream balls that are wrapped in this mochi, which is a kind of like glutenous rice dough. I'm not going to make ice cream today, even though it is the weather for it, but also it is also not because everything would melt and I'd get really stressed out. I'm going to be making strawberries and cream mi.
Delicious chewy balls filled with whipped cream and a lovely strawberry gel in the middle. They are so delicious. Now, I've tried this a few times. I started off by trying Jessica from Utaste Kitchen's recipe. Um, and that was my base because that was the only recipe that I could find that didn't use a microwave. Um, and that did it in a pan. I don't have a microwave. The other way to make it is in the oven with like a water bath and that just seemed annoying. Jessica's recipe on Utay's Kitchen is using a pan and I wanted to do it like that. I've changed the recipe to cuz I felt like it needed a little bit of this and that.
Uh, my recipe is a touch sweeter than hers. It has a bit of vanilla, also has a bit of salt and slightly different ratios. So, shout out to Jessica for getting me started. Anyway, I'm going to start with a medium sized pan. I've got a whisk and a spatula. To start with, I'm going to put the glutenous rice flour. Now, it's really important that when you buy the rice flour, it is glutenous. I mean, you can get this at almost all decent Asian supermarkets, but just make sure you don't just get rice flour because it needs to be glutenous. And I don't know what happens if you don't use glutenous. Presumably, it's not very glutenous. So, I have 105 g of that. I'm just going to pop that
into the saucepan along with 30 g of corn flour, 40 g of caster sugar, a little pinch of salt, half a teaspoon of good quality vanilla extract, 175 g of whole milk, and a tiny little bit of pink food coloring. And then just whisk that all together until it's completely smooth. Once that's all smooth, you can switch up your utensils and get your spatula out and start heating on a medium heat. Once it starts to get a little bit warmer, you can pop 25 g of butter. I'm using unsalted cold butter here. and just stir that in using your spatula. Now, this is where heat control is really important because you want it to be hot enough that it cooks out the flour and stops it from tasting chalky.
But if you have it too hot, it can thicken up way too quickly. So, what we want to do here is stir, stir, stir. And when it feels like it's starting to get lumpy and thick, that's fine. But we need to just control the heat a little bit. So, turn it down if you feel like it's too fierce. And then use your spatula to scrape off the lumpy bits. Push them back into the rest of the mixture. And eventually we've ended up with this. Looks a bit like used chewing gum. It took probably about 15 minutes of hardcore scraping and smooshing and sort of folding and scraping. Again, when you watch Jessica's video, which I hope you will, I don't understand what pan she's using, but like there is some serious non-stick
action going on there. I have made this now here at home in three different pans. I have not had one just slide around the pan like she did. That's okay cuz I've got a nice uh I'm using my dough scraper actually just to scrape the bottom. So, I'm losing a tiny bit of dough uh compared to hers. It comes off the pan easily once you've soaked it. So, you know, you haven't ruined your pan. It's really hot right now. It's really sticky. Grab yourself some um latex gloves because if you try and do this next bit with your bare hands, you're going to be getting so much dough stuck to you. You'll lose a lot of dough. I'm going to be using a non-stick board as well to do this next bit. We
have to knead the dough. So, while there is no gluten in rice flour or corn flour, it becomes glutenous. So, it's not it doesn't like develop gluten, but it becomes glutenous. Um, so we need but we need to develop that glutenous texture. Uh, but through, you know, we've already done half the hard work through heating and now we need to knead it. So, clear the decks, grab yourself something like this. This is a non-stick um board. Uh, I got it from like a cake decorating supplier, got your gloves, and just turn out your dough. And then it will still be hot, so just proceed with caution. And if you want, you can do this in a mixer with a dough hook if you like, but you will also then lose a
little bit of dough cuz it will get stuck. But we're going to work this. We're just going to stretch it out by hand using a kneading motion as if you're making bread or as if you're kneading sugar paste or something like that. And just knead it for a few minutes until it's really stretchy. I've just shaped my dough into a sort of sausage and I've covered it with cling film and it can stay like that for a little while you make other things. I have made one thing already and that is my strawberry gel. Now, this is going to be inserted into the center of the bowl, but also I'm going to use it to flavor the cream. So, this is it. At the moment, it's jellified. Oh, it smells so good. All I did to make that was in a saucepan, I put around 340 g of
strawberries, 55 g of sugar, and a tablespoon of lemon juice. I gave that a little stir and then cooked that over a lowmedium heat. Now, it takes a little while. There's a lot of liquid in strawberries, so you do need to reduce that down a bit. So, I had that bubbling away and squashing it every now and then for about 15 20 minutes. You don't want to do it for too long or too high, otherwise you lose that vibrant red color and it goes a bit brown. So, once I'd cooked a lot of the moisture out, I took it off the heat, but I used a stick blender just to smush up all the remaining pulp so that it was nice and smooth and then set that to one side.
Now, because this is quite a liquidy mixture, I wanted to just stabilize it a little bit. So, I've used a little bit of gelatin. So, all I did there was I bloom my gelatin. I've got 6 g of gelatin granules which I sprinkled over the top of four tablespoons of water and just let that sit for 5 or 10 minutes just to absorb. And then over a banmarie I just melted that. You could also do that in a microwave. Then once that gelatin is melted, you can pour that in with your strawberry mixture. Now it's best to do this while this is still hot. Give it a good stir until it's all completely combined. And then I just popped that into a container, put cling film directly onto the top so it didn't
like form a skin or anything. And then left that to chill. And as you can see, it's gone. It's not like a jelly, but it is sort of firm. And we're going to loosen this up with the whisk. So, I'm just going to put this into a bowl and just whisk it with a hand whisk just to smooth it all out. So, I've just realized when I've whipped my cream that I meant to put mascapony in and completely forgot. But anyway, I forgot to do that. So, I've just used all double cream. But either way is absolutely fine. I prefer the richness and the cream, the extra creaminess that mascapony gives you. So, when I do it with mascapone, I do half and half. But altogether, you want 250 gram of cream um or half and half cream mascapony,
double cream. And then I'm going to start by putting four tablespoons or so of the strawberry gel mixture. And then just whisk that with a hand whisk. You could do this with a mixer if you want. Just keep an eye on it cuz it will whip up quite quickly. You could add a little bit of sugar if you wanted to. I personally like these not super sweet, so I'm not going to do that today, but if you want to, go ahead. And then just whisk that cream until just before it reaches stiff peaks. Don't want to go too far with it because once you go too far with cream, it can go grainy and split and be kind of irretrievable. Now, I've popped mine into a big piping bag and I've also put some of my strawberry
jam mixture into a smaller piping bag. I'm not going to use all of it because I don't need to. So, I'll probably save that to make something else like I could drizzle it over ice cream or maybe fill a cake with it. And there's a couple of other things we're going to need. So, I've got a small non-stick rolling pin here. I've also got cupcake cases. These are the crumbs and doilies ones which you can get from cupcakejemma.com. These are the best ones. And I've also got this bowl which is kind of the closest thing I could find to a sort of mochi ball mold, which I believe exists, but I couldn't find one anywhere online. So, I've just tried to find a bowl that's similar to the size of mochi ball I'm
making. I've also got some more. This is actually potato starch. You could use corn flour or you could use a little bit more of the glutenous rice flour. That's just to stop the balls from sticking when we roll them out. And now we just need to divide the dough. So I'm going to divide my dough up into pieces just equally. Then using my hands just in a circular motion with my fingers as a kind of cage to swirl them around to form a tight ball. And then just pop them onto the work top which has been dusted with the potato starch. And now I'm going to use my little non-stick rolling pin, which is super cute, and my non-stick board to roll these balls out into circles. Now I'm wanting them to be
four or 5 in because what we need to do is fill them and gather them up and make a nice tight seal. Now, another thing I can't do as well as Jessica is roll out the dough in perfect circles in such a speedy motion. If you check out her video, you'll be like, "How does she do that?" I'm I'm guessing it's practice, but I have only made these a few times, so I haven't got the knack yet. So, now I'm going to set about filling them. So, grab your little bowl or mochi mold. Pop it down. I've put a little bit of the potato flour in that bowl just to stop it from sticking.
Just going to grab one of these discs. Lay it gently over the top of the bowl, smoothing out any creases that form. And then starting with my cream, I'm going to just make a kind of spiral shape going from the middle to about halfway up to the edge of the disc. And what I'm trying to do here is create a kind of bowl because into the middle of that, I'm going to pipe a bit of the strawberry gel just for a little strawberry surprise when you bite into the mochi ball. So once you've done that, you can grab back your whipped cream and just seal that up by piping a little bit more on top. Now we need to seal this bowl. So I'm going to gather the edges of my disc up into my fingertips as neatly as I possibly can
without leaving any bits behind. And then I'm going to give that a really good pinch and pinch the excess dough off. And then just finish that off with a little sprinkling of the starch just to stop it from sticking. And then gently pop that into a cupcake case. Hello. Look at this little guy with this little surprising strawberry gel inside. M. If you've never had matchi before, it is a really strange texture that, you know, many of us aren't really used to.
It's glutenous. I don't really know how else to describe it, but it is so yummy. And then we've got the really, really light whipped cream inside, ever so slightly flavored with that strawberry gel. And then the little pocket of very intense zingy strawberry inside. And I would recommend keeping them in the fridge just because they firm up a little bit and make it easier to handle. If you are going to keep them in the fridge sort of overnight, put them in an airtight container. Otherwise, the mochi can kind of harden in the fridge, which isn't very nice. Becomes a bit leathery.
This is lovely. really light, creamy, lovely little hit of strawberry and that mochi dough is just yummy. So, I really hope you give it a go. It's a really fun thing to make and you could definitely mix up the flavors and maybe I'm thinking I might do like a caramel chocolate one at some point with a sort of creme diplomat or um a caramel with a caramel filling. That'd be really yummy. And of course, you can make them different colors if you want, but the basic dough recipe is good to go and you can just fill it with whatever you fancy. So, please let me know what you think about this. Please give it a go.
Let me know how you get on in the comments below. If you have ever made mochi, let me know. Let the people know how you if you like it, if you're a lover or a hater. Some people find it not very pleasant, but I love it. Um, so please share your mochi experiences in the comments box and um, please tune in a couple of weeks for another recipe. So we'll see you then. Bye.
