Kakimochi is also known as Japanese rice cracker. It’s a teriyaki crunchy cracker and yes, there are some Hawaii bakeries that put them in cookies. The cracker kind of acts as a replacement for nuts or cereal, anything crunchy. Don’t knock it til you try it!

When I saw HEART SHAPED kakimochi in Hawaii, well, I just couldn’t resist and I knew I had to make up my own version of this old skool snack…

ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 /2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup crushed kakimochi (arare) + more to decorate if you wish
3/4 cup mini chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and prep baking sheets with silpats.

I have NEVER come across kakimochi in this shape except for in Hawaii. It is so cute I can hardly stand it.

You can use any shape, of course since hearts are pretty hard to find. It hurts to crush up these cute little kakimochi hearts, but it has to be done.

In a freezer bag, place the kakimochi and crush them to pieces using a rolling pin, your hands, your full aggression. Hello anger management. Set aside.

In a small bowl whisk together the flour and the baking soda. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and the brown sugar. Add the egg and the vanilla.

Add in the flour/baking soda mixture until combined.

Personally, I love mini chocolate chips. They add a lot of flavor in very little bites.

By hand, fold in the crushed kakimochi and the mini choco chips into the batter.

Spoon by teaspoonfulls onto the prepped baking sheets. Make them rounded and press them down slightly. Since the heart were SO cute I also placed one on top of each batter ball before sending it into the oven. You don’t have to do this, but I thought it looked adorable and added even more crunch.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until brown. Let cool on a wire rack.

For people who may have only eaten kakimochi as a snack, this is a new and interesting take that is worth trying out!

There’s nothing lovelier than a deep shade of purple. But what makes this ice cream so colorful? YAM of course. What.

I thought a nice color – as well as textural – contrast would be to pair it with a cupcake – not just any cupcake, a mochi cupcake!

ingredients:
1/3 cup butter, softened
1 cup flour
3/4 cup mochiko
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup milk

Ube ice cream

Ube is the Filipino word for yam and you can make some amazingly colorful sweets with it. Don’t be scared – it’s really tasty, honest. At certain asian markets you can find Ube Ice Cream pre-made in the freezer section.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prep a cupcake pan with liners.

In a medium bowl whisk the flour, mochiko, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar, then add the eggs until light and fluffy, then add the vanilla. Alternate the flour mixture with the milk, until combined.

Pour into prepped liners. Bake for 15-17 minutes depending on your oven, testing with a toothpick. Let cool on a wire rack.

Keep the cupcakes in an airtight container or in the freezer (individually wrapped) until you are ready to use them. Then take a scoop of Ube Ice Cream and sit it right on top. A pretty little presentation – great for a hot summer day.

The kids are back to school and boy are they NOT feelin’ it. Every morning is a struggle, I don’t blame them, I know two weeks off is a long time AND their brand new Christmas toys are waiting at home. Still, life moves on so suck it up. You’ve got a lot of school ahead of you kids.

Not only do I have to pack the Kid’s lunch for school, but snacks too. While I am generally opposed to pre-packaged things, I do use them for the kid’s snacks, as they are individually wrapped and fairly sturdy. Once in a while I try to surprise him by putting in a little something different.

Today I made a matcha roll cake. Roll cakes are waaaay easier than you’d expect, don’t be afraid of them. This one is a green tea cake and the filling is a sweetened red bean. The cake is stunning in color, not overly sweet – and heck, doesn’t it just look like something Yoda would eat for snack??

Matcha Roll Cake recipe, here.

Eating soba noodles on New Year’s Day is supposed to guarantee you long life. Hm. So much for ‘an apple a day’, I guess.

Anyway, I took the kids to the Japanese American National Museum where they had an ‘Oshogatsu’ New Year’s Day celebration. They showed the kids how to put together a bowl of soba noodles and then the kids got to eat it too! Not bad for a FREE museum day.

ingredients:
12-14 ounces dry soba noodles (buckwheat noodles)
dipping sauce
nori (dried seaweed)
green onions
kamaboko (fish cake)
cucumber

sauce ingredients:
2 cups dashi (soup base)
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup mirin

First make the dipping sauce, put the dashi, soy sauce and mirin in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and cool. Quite honestly – I’m not gonna be a stickler here – you can get a bottle of dippin sauce for like two dollars at the Japanese market if you are so inclined. I won’t say nothin’.

Fill a large pot with water, approx 4 – 6 cups. Bring to a boil. Add the dry soba noodles and stir – usually this take only 2-3 minutes. Drain the noodles well and rinse with cold water.

You can top the noodles with anything really. Cucumber cut small, nori cut into fine strips, sliced kamaboko. Shredded chicken or char siu works too. (See somen salad recipe.)

Put some soba into bowls, top with the toppings you like and add a small ladle of the sauce. You don’t want a soup, you just want your noodles to be wet. Aaaaand…eat!

New Years Day is coming – I’m resting up for two full days of cooking. A big part of my Japanese New Years party is mochi. Mochi is a traditional Japanese rice cake – it can be sweet – but on New Year’s it’s plain, eaten with kinako or soy sauce+sugar.

In the old days my family used to pound mochi by hand with mallets. THAT’s old skool. Me? I use the new electric plugged in machine with very minimal work on my part because I live in the future.

I recently went to thefoodlibrarian’s house where they used old school machines to make their mochi. They’ve been doing it for 40 years and they’ve got the process down – steaming the rice, extruding the mochi, cooling the mochi, forming the mochi, letting it sit in a bed of mochiko flour, and then finally packaging it. We made over 250 pounds of mochi. Unbelievable.

It was a lot of work but so worth it. There’s nothing as good as fresh mochi!

Hard to believe it’s finally the end of Food Librarian’s ‘I like Big Bundts: 30 days of Bundt Cakes‘.

Yesterday she came over and dropped off the cutest little tiny bundt cake ever. It was made with my fave ingredient – mochi! Matcha Mochi Bundts, too cute! I want to slice these up and have a miniature tea party.

Check out all 30 recipes, here.

I decided to throw together some yogurt cupcakes, but with a twist. A nice green ribbon twist to be exact. I used strawberry yogurt mixed with green tea matcha powder to get the prettiest little pink and green cupcakes ever. However, I must admit…I cheated. I added two drops of pink food coloring cause the strawberry yogurt just wasn’t giving me that pink Pantone color that I so desired. Designers. Never satisfied.

I love they way they came out – and the MOST important thing – moist and tasty.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup strawberry yogurt
1/2 cup of melted butter
2 drop pink gel food food coloring

1 Tablespoon green tea matcha powder
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 Tablespoon milk

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Prep a cupcake pan with liners. In a bowl, whisk together flour and baking powder.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the eggs and sugar until well mixed. Carefully add the flour mixture. Add the yogurt – mix well. Carefully add the melted butter until stirred in.

In a small bowl, mix the powdered green tea and sugar with the milk, mixing it into a paste. (Much like you’d do for green tea ice cream…) Add 1/2 cup of cake batter until it turns a lovely green.

With the leftover batter, I add two drop of gel food coloring – pink. It gives a lovely balance to the green of the green tea. And for some reason it tricks the eye (and stomach) into believing that the taste is more ’strawberry’. Sight is a funny thing. Now in your prepped liners, alternate the two batters by spoonful until you get to about 3/4 of the way full.

To get the nice marbled look, take a knife, toothpick, chopstick – whatever you have and make figure 8s in the batter. You’ll be surprised how well this works.
Bake for 17-20 minutes until you get a clean toothpick. Let cool on a wire rack.

Dust with powdered sugar if desired – serve.

I never knew that these things had a name. O.G. always called them FOOTBALLS cause that’s what they looked like. Brilliant, I tell you. Anyway I was shocked at how simple they are to make and the kids absolutely love them.

ingredients:
2 cups rice
1/4 cup rice vinegar
3/4 teaspoons salt
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 Tablespoon sake (I left this out when I made it for the kids, fyi)
1 package aburage aka tofu pouches

Cook your rice in the rice cooker. While that’s going, in a small bowl mix together the rice vinegar, salt, sugar and sake if you are using it. Set aside.

Now bring a pot of water to a boil and heat the aburage according to the package directions. Obviously this is the easy step, since the thing is pre-made. Pretty awesome and simple.

When the rice is done, mix it will with the sauce ingredients that you’ve mixed together. Careful, the rice is HOT.

Now get your prepped aburage ready. They look like little pockets.

Using a spoon, stuff the prepped rice into the pockets and serve. It’s that simple!

‘Moffles’ are mochi thrown into a waffle maker, thus calling themselves…moffles. While that’s all well and good, I wanted to make an actual WAFFLE. So I made up some waffle batter but changed the ingredients to add mochiko. What I got was a crispy waffle with a mochi chew, not too far off the weirdness path and perfect for brunch. (It tastes better in a Hello Kitty waffle maker, for sure)

ingredients:
1 cup flour
1 cup mochiko
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1-1/2 cups milk
2 eggs

Prep your waffle iron by buttering it up. The mochiko makes this batter pretty sticky, so you want to make sure you can get them out.

Combine all the dry ingredients, then add the wet. Mixing until just combined.

Pour into your waffle maker, and wait til they come out a nice crispy brown.

You’ll notice the familiar mochi chew. Great with fruit and syrup – something different for your morning breakfast.

All the coffee lovers in the house say HEY…HO! I LOVE coffee. I thought it’d be cute to make Coffee+Donuts Cupcakes, using the coffee cupcake and frosting as a nice flavorful base. I know not everyone has a Mini Donut Maker, so here’s just the recipe for the cupcakes. They are really excellent on their own.

ingredients:
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) softened
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1-1/3 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup strong brewed coffee
1/8 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

(coffee frosting recipe, below)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prep a cupcake pan with liners.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Combine the coffee and milk, set aside.

Alternate the flour and the coffee mixture into the butter mixture, beating until combined.

Pour batter into prepared pans. Bake for about 15-20 minutes depending on your oven. Let cool on a wire rack.

The cakes become more coffee-vescent the longer they sit. These make a really nice cake as is. The coffee frosting is just a nice touch.

Coffee Frosting:
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
2-1/2 Tablespoons coffee
1 Tablespoon milk (as needed)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

In the bowl of an electric mixer cream butter, carefully adding the sugar, coffee, and vanilla; mix until light and fluffy. Add a little of the milk at a time to get the right consistency. Turn the mixer up to high and beat well.

Quite obviously, if you have a donut maker OR a tiny sous chef to help sprinkle the donuts: top these with a donut to make coffee+donut cupcakes. Or just buy mini donuts from the store, they make a really cute presentation.

Then you can just top these with a donut to make coffee+donut cupcakes. Or just buy mini donuts from the store, they make a really cute presentation.