Happy New Year to you all again!  Hope you had great Christmas and New Year’s Day. The first sweet I would like to introduce you in 2017 is this sweet called ‘Hanabira Mochi‘.

Petal Mochi (Hanabira Mochi)

‘Hanabira‘ means flower petal in Japanese so I shall call this sweet Petal Mochi.

It is a sweet we traditionaly have only during New Year period. It started in the palace to celebrate a New Year by eating two layers of white and red mochi with some other food. Until the Meiji period the custom spread out to people in the country and the food got simplified onto some similar type of sweet that I made here.

This Petal Mochi is composed of two layers of ‘Mochi‘ (Rice Cake) sheets and the centre part. The Mochi is delicately thin so that pink colour of the inner layer can be seen through the outer white layer.

It originally has a small stick (or two) of Burdock cooked in syrup and ‘Miso-An‘ which is white bean paste flavoured with white ‘Miso‘ (fermented bean paste) as the centre, but I used Parsnip and ‘Shiro-An‘ (white bean paste) instead. It is because I thought not many English people would be familiar with Burdock or Miso flavour.

It is free from Gluten, Dairy and Egg.

This Petal Mochi will be served in Wasoukan Café (Notting Hill, London) during January.