When I’m cooking alone, it’s really hard to surprise myself. I know exactly what goes into my cooking, and I can mostly predict the outcome. But with these mystery mochi parcels, I finally could be surprised!
This came about somewhat unintentionally. I was initially craving mochi so I started off by just making a glutinous rice dough, kneaded it and portioned it out. I wanted to give them a PB&J filling, but then I thought, hmm why don’t I give each individual mochi a different filling? So I did! I filled peanut butter in a few, jam in others, and used nutella and even kaya (Malaysian coconut jam) for some of the final few stragglers.
I folded them into these square parcels — mainly because this was the easiest way to wrap a liquid filling without it spilling out, but on the plus side they also turned out looking pretty cool — boiled them up, and let them simmer in a brown sugar syrup, at which point they all mixed up and it became tricky to tell them apart.
But this made them a lot more fun to eat, because I didn’t know the flavour I was getting until I bit into each mochi. Which maybe is a metaphor for relationships — you never truly know if you’ll like someone until you give it a try. Although to be honest I actually did like all of these mochis, so the metaphor kinda falls apart there… Oh well, they’re still a brilliantly tasty meal to make for (and to surprise) yourself!
1 thought on “Mochi Surprise”
I’m not a peanut butter jelly gal…
I mean like fresh fruit? Preserves?
Or a few different bean pastes?