Print

Peppermint mochi

These are wonderful plain, but if you’re a mint wuss like me, you can top some ultra-thick drinking chocolate with them or put them in cookies!  A warning about hot chocolate — last year I tried almond mochi with matcha hot chocolate and found, to endless hilarity, that they sank straight to the bottom and I had to fish them up to eat them, so this year I made Marta’s eat-it-with-a-spoon hot chocolate and found that it was perfect.  (Plus, it uses up that other half-can of coconut milk you’ll have from the mochi!)

Ingredients

Scale
  • 1 cup (150 g) sweet rice (mochiko) flour
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 cup water
  • 3/4 cup (6 oz) coconut milk (a little less than half of a 13.5 oz can)
  • 1/2 tsp peppermint extract
  • 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
  • 48 drops red food coloring (optional)
  • sweet potato starch or regular cornstarch for dusting
  • a cup or two of extra-thick hot chocolate, for serving (optional, but delicious and a great way to use up the leftover coconut milk!)

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 275 degrees. Line a 9×13 baking dish with parchment paper or grease it.
  2. In a large bowl, whisk together the mochiko, sugar, and baking powder. In a separate bowl, whisk together the water, coconut milk, and peppermint extract. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and whisk until the mixture is smooth and no lumps remain. (No worries about over-mixing here — sweet rice flour is gluten-free, and mochi is chewy to begin with!)
  3. Pour the batter into the parchment-lined baking dish. If you like, you can add a few drops of red food coloring to the batter to turn it a light pink, or pour about three-quarters of the batter, then color the remaining batter and pour that in to create patches of pink and white mochi. I had grand plans of swirling the batter into a pretty red and white marbled pattern, but, as it turns out, the mochi is too soft to hold a sharp pattern after it’s baked. Alas!
  4. Cover with foil and bake for about 60 minutes. The mochi is done when it is soft and gelatinous but bounces back when touched.
  5. Let cool completely or overnight. Dust a surface with your starch (alternatively, you can simply use more mochiko flour) and turn the mochi onto the surface. Sprinkle starch over the mochi. Cut the mochi into small pieces, then dust again with starch or flour, and serve! I liked them as a topping for this thick, spoonable hot chocolate, or mixed into brownie cookies, like these dark chocolate truffle cookies.