24 Bakes: Chocolate Birthday Cake Butter Mochi
Bake #4 was for no one's birthday but also everyone's
Why this Recipe
Besides wanting to experiment with making something I hadn’t had much, I really made Chocolate Birthday Cake Butter Mochi because I searched “sprinkles” in the NYT Cooking app and this recipe came up. I immediately saved it for my birthday, but after life life-ing, I decided that we should celebrate our birthdays every day.
Side note: The NYT Cooking app is the best, right? I feel like it has the excitement of Pinterest with less digging.
The Recipe
I chose this recipe because I wanted to make something I had never made before, which is the whole point of this year-long “experiment”. If you’ve never had mochi, it’s a Japanese rice cake made from sweet rice flour (mochiko). They’re typically smaller and stuffed with red bean or other pastes. This recipe takes that concept and turns it into a giant rice cake, and resembles, before tasting, brownies. There is nothing stuffed inside, but instead, it’s topped with a sugary peanut butter frosting.
And a nice part of this recipe is that it’s gluten-free!
How it Went
This recipe was pretty easy, even though I had never, ever made mochi or anything close to it before.
I shared it with my improv group (which makes me remember I made this recipe in February, four months before my birthday month which is this month), and they all enjoyed it so I think I did something right!
Basically, this was a very easy recipe. The batter doesn’t require a mixer and you basically mix your heart out (a recipe that doesn’t say “don’t overmix” is my best friend). Also, it was one of my first times “folding” in ingredients (FOLD IN THE CHEESE, DAVID!), which was a truly confusing experience that I probably should have googled before attempting. I made a terrible recording of my attempts but due to privacy reasons (okay, I’m just embarrassed), no one will see it here.
My biggest issue was with the peanut butter frosting — because it requires thicker sugar, I could not get it to be “the texture of frosting” like the recipe says and I still don’t know how you’re supposed to get there.
Also, I omitted the pop rocks. It seemed like a lot to me! And it would have been — this is a very sweet cake.
What I Learned
I definitely didn’t know how to use my oven. After the last post (months ago), I received a few pointers about the difference between a convection oven and a regular oven, but I had already made this mochi. That means the mochi was a lil more like a brownie on the outside and a lil more like mochi in the middle.
Embrace “weird” textures. No, I don’t mean mochi itself, I mean the topping! As mentioned, the sugar was thicc and impossible to make it a “typical” smooth frosting. The mixture of the crunchy frosting and spongy, marshmallow like mochi was perfect.
Sometimes, you should read the comments. I only figured out that the frosting texture was supposed to be a little crunchy by reading the comments. Because the recipe said “texture of frosting” I assumed that it might actually get smooth. Honestly, I still don’t know, but the comments said let it ride so I did.
