Coconut Custard Mochi with Ube Ganache and Ice Cream – Recipe

Every so often I'll make a massive mistake while creating a new recipe for this blog. Very rarely, that mistake will turn out to be a good mistake. This one turned out to be one of the best mistakes ever.

I was feeling the colour purple this week, and decided to do something with ube (purple sweet potato). My aim was just to make a serving suggestion for my old butter mochi recipe from two years ago. Since I didn't need that much butter mochi I decided to halve the recipe... but not only did I forget to halve the coconut milk, eggs and butter, I also used an inexplicably weird quantity of eggs and butter compared to last time too. I only realised when I mixed everything together and it was really liquid-y.

I decided to bake it anyway, since I hate waste. I reckoned it would probably taste good, whatever happened: but I expected to have to start again from scratch another day for a decent recipe post here. Thankfully, I was wrong: it turned out to be a brilliant, post-able accident.

When I first took it out of the oven, it was all puffy like a souffle, but quickly sank into something beautifully ugly. This was to be expected, since I'd used so much liquid. I sliced into it, not sure what to expect...

On the outside my creation was crispy, chewy and buttery. On the inside, it was a rich, coconut custard-flavoured mochi, but with a more tender bite to it than a classic mochi.

The ube white chocolate ganache is pretty much the same I used to glaze my ube cheesecake with. As for the ube ice cream, I just couldn't resist adding a few more delicious calories.

I could have stopped at this but... nah...

Let's go!

Ingredients for Butter Mochi:

225g glutinous rice flour
225g caster sugar
100g unsalted butter, melted
5 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla
Pinch of salt

Ingredients for Ube Ganache:

100g white chocolate

100g double cream

1 tbsp unsalted butter

3 tsp ube flavour

To Serve:

Ube or vanilla ice cream

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and grease and line an 8" square baking tin with non-stick baking parchment.

2. Whisk all of the mochi ingredients together, pour into the pan and bake for about 1 hour, or until a skewer poked through the centre comes out clean and the top is puffy and golden. Leave to cool.

3. To make the ganache, put the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl. Bring the cream to the boil in a small saucepan, take off the heat and pour over the chocolate and butter, stirring to melt. Stir in the ube flavouring and leave to cool and thicken to a pouring consistency.

4. Slice the cooled mochi cake and serve with plenty of ganache and ice cream. And a berry, if you feel like it. (Disclaimer: the berry won't make it healthy, but it does look darn cute.)

Enjoy, and have fun!