A Recipe for Disaster… Saved!

Take one tired girl, add a yen for a sugar fix. Sprinkle with unfamiliar ingredients. What you usually get is one complete recipe for disaster.

Seriously — every time I a.) cook when I’m tired, and b.) cook when I’m tired with unfamiliar ingredients, bad things happen. But, this was rice flour. Plain, white, powdery stuff to which you just add water and it practically makes a white sauce on its own. What could go wrong?

Oh, any number of things. First, white sauce isn’t usually all that appetizing, sorry to those of you who live and breath your Hollandaise. Second, the only rice flour experience I’ve had is munching on rice flour formed into red bean mooncakes, and since I’m not a Korean Mom, like the woman who made them for me, I can’t expect to do that recipe any justice whatsoever. What was I doing with rice flour when I really wanted a chocolate-dipped macaroon and to go back to bed?

While I am not at ALL bored with chocolate macaroons, I really, really, really, really, really needed to go to the grocery store. I was out of just about everything, including “normal” flour. I was jonesing for cookies and too lazy to walk across the street to the Sainsbury’s at the gas (er, petrol) station (and frankly, I’m still not used to that… it feels like shopping at a 7-11, which I would normally avoid like the plague) in the rain. It was that simple. It’s been pouring for days, and I’d been drenched liberally the day before, walking from Helensburgh to Rhu. Laziness is the mother of a bunch more inventive children than is Necessity, I believe. To avoid the rain, I pawed through the cabinets until I came up with something utterly familiar and utterly foreign. Mochiko.

This box was familiar because I have dragged it to FIVE — count ’em — FIVE houses without ever opening it. And it was foreign for just that same reason — I bought it on a whim at an Asian market years ago, then couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Well. Despite its antiquity, I figured that combined with enough sugar, it still counted as an ingredient, and so, its time had come.

Now, I’ve read lots of bloggers going on about delicately flavored green tea mochi and all, but again — I’m not Asian, and I was feeling lazy, remember? Actual recipes weren’t actually going to get through to me. I wanted cookies, and was looking for a full-scale disaster. I found three recipes, and from them I roughed out one that looked like it might work. It might be cake. It might be bars. It might be cookies. I had no idea where I was going with this… but away I went.

What I wanted to do originally was make Liz Steinberg’s Mochi Hamantaschen, which are traditional filled cookies made for the Jewish holiday, Purim. But, while fiddling with my recipe, I added too much liquid. I discarded the hamantasch idea until another day, and decided to see what I came up with. A panicked last minute addition of tapioca flour was probably not necessary, as the flour eventually does hydrate — and it probably will go a lot faster if it’s not a box that’s five or seven years old. But I digress. Here, in all its slap-dash glory, is the recipe:

Chewy Coconut Mochi Bars

• 1 Box Elderly Rice Flour, minus 1/4 c. (the elderly is optional)
• 1 c. tapioca flour – also left randomly in the cabinet
• 1/2 c. white sugar
• 1.5 c. brown sugar
• 8 ounces of coconut milk (I mixed mine from powdered)
• 3/4 c. “regular” milk (for me, that’s soy)
• 1/4 c. oil, or melted butter if you choose – one recipe called for 8 oz.
• 2/3 c. dried coconut
• Brown sugar, coconut, or chocolate for topping

1. Set your oven to 350°F or about 170°C
2. Next, prepare a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan by lining it with baking paper.
3. Then, mix oil, sugars and milks in a large measuring cup or small bowl. Mix the dry ingredients separately, then add wet to dry.
4. Pour the very thick, creamy, caramel colored slurry into your papered pan. Do not panic, it WILL be eventually a lot less gritty. If your flour is fairly recent to the planet, it will probably be even less gritty still. By the way, some recipes suggest you grease the paper lining your pan, I did not, as the paper I use is silicone coated.
5. Bake mid-rack for forty-five minutes. Turn off the oven, and allow to cool with the oven door cracked open a touch for an additional twenty to thirty minutes, to allow your bars to set.

I took icing sugar, a little water and lemon juice and a lot of coconut to make a little frosting. Again — too much liquid, so it was more of a glaze than a frosting, but it turned out to be the perfect compliment. The oven here bakes hot, and we probably should have opened ours all the way to avoid the bars getting a teensy bit crunchy and golden-brown, but the topping was a perfect foil. Coconutty, chewy with that traditional rice-flour gel thing, but also dense and cake-like. These are hard to describe, but really, quite good.

Crazy, huh? I mean, what are the chances that a lazy rainy-day concoction would actually turn out right?

Those of you who like mochi will love these, as the familiar, toothsome rice flour goodness is present. Those of you who aren’t sure what mochi IS, much less whether you’re into such chewy, gluey goodness will be glad to know that it’s just glutinous rice, soaked overnight, and pounded to a paste, which is dried and sold, or used fresh and formed into cakes for many Lunar New Year celebrations. Even those who don’t like mochi might still like these, because they’re firmed up by baking, and the coconut flakes inside give you a little something more to gnaw on. I imagine this would be quite tasty with bits of candied ginger, chunks of dried fruit, or frosted with that brick of chocolate you’ve been saving for ganache.

I’ll be trying this again — not only to make the hamantaschen, but to perfect these bars. First stop — fresh flour. Unlike wheat flour, with the fat of the germ, rice flour doesn’t go rancid, but fresh is always best, unless you’re dealing with wine or something. As a general rule in using rice, I notice the more stale it is, the longer it takes to cook it, and in all likelihood, any grittiness that I taste in the bars is partially from the fact that I’ve used rice flour, but more because old rice doesn’t take in water as well.

More ideas are flowing — I’m thinking of pumpkin mochi bars, citrus with lime zest, or a chewy cranberry. I look forward to more experimentation! Next time I’m tired…

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.