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.
This sounds delicious! We do like the taste of burdock, but it’s such a good idea to use more locally available ingredients like parsnips too!
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Happy New Year and thank you. Yes, I love burdock too but it is hard to find in the UK. I thought it would be easier to explain what the stick part is to English people if it’s parsnip instead. 🙂
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Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu, Mutsumi-san!
What a great idea to use pasnip instead! Hanabira Mochi sounded really odd at the first encounter, esp. the combination of Miso & Gobo but now I love it! Must get one by the 7th!
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Happy New Year!
I chose Parsnip because it has slightly similar texture to Burdock, but the hint of parsnip flavour matched quite well with ShiroAn. 🙂
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I wish I could taste it!
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I will keep one for you until you come to London!! 😀
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Ta ! 😀
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