Green Tea Mochi Cakes with Red Bean recipe

In a recent trip to Korea, I picked up a few bottles of Green tea/Matcha powder at O'sulloc Tea Museum from Jeju. O'sulloc Tea Museum is a beautiful place with green tea plantations and there is lovely section selling a variety of green tea and tea products.

If you come here, you simply must try their green tea ice cream. It is creamy with an intense green tea flavour and reminds me of a soft-serve version of the Häagen-Dazs green tea ice cream. We also ordered a hot green tea latte and it tasted much better than the commercial ones you get from Starbucks.

Yummies oozing with green tea goodness

Back to the main stars of today's post, I bought a pack of this in fours at KRW$20,000. Each bottle weighs 50g and costs about SGD$5.60 which is quite affordable considering I get normal green tea baking powder from Red Man at $2.60 for 20g or from Sun Lik at $10.60 for 100g.

I went on a hunt for some unique green tea recipes and chanced upon this by Sonia of Nasi Lemak Lover. Matcha and Red Bean Mochi Cake. Mochi cake?? I wondered how the texture will be like, chewy yet cake like in texture? How exciting!

I followed Sonia's directions but made the following adaptations.

Ingredients

1. Substitute evaporated milk with condensed milk (Milkmaid brand). There is no difference between unsweetened condensed and evaporated milk but since I am using sweetened condensed milk, I reduced the sugar to 80g.

2. Reduce butter to 80g

3. To cook red beans, I boiled 100g of beans with 1 litre of water and 3 tablespoons of white sugar for 1h 10 minutes. Next time, I would suggest to soak the beans in the saucepan overnight and cook the beans thereafter. That should  help shorten the cooking time and save some gas! Also, I would think 80g of red beans will be more than enough to top up the cupcakes.

Method

1. Beat the eggs and sugar till pale yellow. I go from speed 1 to 2 to 3 at 15 seconds each and go back to speed 2 to 1 at 10 seconds each.

2. Add in condensed milk and melted butter. Mix well.

3. Sieve in flour and green tea powder mixture and mix well till no flour traces can be seen.

4. Fill up 12 cupcake mould and top each cupcake with red bean. 

 Tips/issues

Beating the eggs from speed 1 to 2 to 3 to 2 to 1, meaning from slow to fast to slow helps to stabilise the air bubbles when beating the mixture.

I baked these treats at 180 degrees for close to an hour as I kept getting wet crumbs in my toothpick when testing if the cakes were done. In the first place, I am not sure how "done" should the cake be as it was my first time baking with glutinous rice flour. In the end, I over-baked my cakes and the red beans were dried out and (gasp!) crispy.

They were great fresh out of oven but after I placed them in the fridge they turned hard. Perhaps it is better to leave them in an air-tight container outdoors. <Update> I steamed the cakes before eating them as I had already left them in the fridge. Steaming brings moisture to the cakes and reverts them back to the fresh-of-out-oven stage.

I will definitely try this recipe again with the recommended baking time (20-25 minutes). The lovely combination of green tea and red bean is too difficult to resist and I love how the condensed/evaporated milk adds a fragrance to the cakes!