K-Recipe: Make a Mochi with Your Favourite Ice Cream 🍦

Mochi rice cake was definitely one thing that I’ve never imagined making at home. If you don’t know what mochi is, it's a very satisfyingly squishy type of rice cake that originated in Japan. Its texture is somewhere between a marshmallow and a sticky rice dough, made by short grain mochigome rice (aka. sweet rice). The most common type of mochi rice cakes tastes very plain, with some sweetness from red bean paste stuffed inside it. This rice cake is popular in both Japan and Korea, which led both countries to make different types of it, including ice cream stuffed ones! You might have seen some of these in your local Asian supermarket.

MLBPARK / IKIDANE NIPPON

I’m a fan of these ice creams myself, so when this cooking trend started in Korea it got me super excited. In a video of a Cooking Youtuber (DUNGYKITCHEN), she took Melona to make a mochi ice cream with it! Melona is a honeydew melon flavoured Korean ice cream bar, which you can find easily in New Zealand as well. Here in NZ, you can also get these in different flavours: strawberry, coconut, banana, and mango 🥭 So how do you transform this frozen cream on a stick, a mochi? 🍡

LOTTE

Ingredients:

• Melona ice cream (4 sticks)
• Sticky rice powder (150g)

The simplicity of this recipe got me surprised, because for some reason I thought making rice cake at home was an impossible task. Turns out, all you need is two ingredients, and a bit of cooking oil! 🧑‍🍳

1) First, you melt three Melonas, until it’s plain liquid. 2) Pour it into a bowl with 150g of sticky rice powder (which you can find in any Asian supermarkets,) and mix well. For this mixture to hold together, 3) cover the bowl with glad wrap, poke wrap with a fork and microwave it for two minutes. 4) Pull it out, mix again, and microwave it with the glad wrap for another two minutes. Make sure you’re not microwaving for four minutes in one go because that might burn the mix and leave you with green goo to throw out 🤢

When you’re done heating up the mix, it would be a lot more sticky and smooth. 5) Give it a good mix with a spatula until the dough looks like one big ball of mochi. Then once your dough is cooled, apply any type of cooking oil on a chopping board and on your hands. Have you ever seen or heard of the Japanese tradition of beating sticky rice with a wooden hammer to make rice cakes? 🔨  We’re gonna do something similar, but you won’t need a hammer. 6) Place the dough on the oily board and relieve all your stress onto the dough by punching it, throwing it, and slapping it to give it some adhesion and chewiness 🥊 Don’t forget to continue adding cooking oil to your dough as you do this, because the sticky mochi might get all over you!

Youtube | Great Big Story

7) Once your dough is soft and jelly-like, divide it into little balls. You can have your Melona mochi like this as well, just by sprinkling some rice powder on top - but we want the ICE CREAM MOCHI! 🍦 8) Flatten out a few of your mochi balls to wrap the bite-sized diced up Melona each. You might want to freeze these ice cream versions for a bit, cause the ice cream might melt as you make all your balls of rice cake. 9) Finish up by sprinkling rice powder, and you have your own Melona Mochi Ice Cream! 🍈 (Watch this video if you want a better idea of how to wrap the ice creams in the dough.)

Youtube | DUNGYKITCHEN

After the hit of these Melona Mochis, Koreans are using the same recipe to make mochi with all of their favourite ice creams! With this easy-and-quick recipe and all the leftover rice powder, it would be a good idea to trial it with your fav popsicles as well 😛 Not only did DUNGYKITCHEN make mochis out of ice creams, but she also has a whole collection of interesting dessert recipes made with Korean-famous snacks and drinks! Give her channel a visit to find out more - her Oreo popcorns got me the most excited 😂