Ever since I first tried mango mochi at Tai O, I’ve been wanting to replicate it myself at home. You’ll have read about my first attempt, dear Reader, which ended up as a lumpy, sticky mess in the bin.

Since then I’ve had cause to replace my elderly bread machine, and what do you know, some Japanese bread machines have a mochi programme? I’ve been itching to try programme number 34 since bringing home my new Panasonic machine, that came only in a lovely earthy shade of brown, much to the amusement of the ladies in our local Wing On department store. No, Miss, it doesn’t come in any other colour, hahahahahaha.

So you start off with this Japanese glutinous rice.

You have to wash off the excess starch until your water runs clear and then let it sit and drain for half an hour. Then you put it in the bread machine pan, with its special noodle and mochi paddle, and wait. A while later, a buzzer sounds and you have to open up the machine so it can drive off the excess water. (I hope you can see. I did have a longer video but WordPress is not the friend of a bigger video file apparently.)

Meanwhile, we’ve prepared the filling. I think in Japan, mochi with filling is not called mochi, but that’s the Hong Kong terminology so let’s go with that. I was a bit shy of using mango as we had in Tai O today, mindful that this was only going to be another prototype so I ran with strawberries, as we saw in Seoul.

This is what it looked like when the machine had finished pounding the dough, after about an hour. On reflection, I think I needed a looser mochi dough, with more water, and it needed some sort of sweetening, so I’ll add a little caster sugar next time, with the risk of making this sticky dough even stickier, hence the preponderance of cornflour. A softer dough would probably make the mochi easier to work and mould, but this was the end result. 6/10, I’d say. Getting there.