Sakura Mochi - Cherry Blossom Rice Cake

This week, I attended a Japanese cooking class at a community centre in a small town near where I live in northern Japan.

The title of the class was "Cooking for your Husband/Boyfriend with Love." (Not being able to read Japanese very well, I did NOT know that until after I had registered, but it does kind of explain why, apart from the male friend who had registered with me, there were only women there... although, since Japanese men are not generally renown for being domestic gods, that shouldn't really have been a surprise.)

I would have to say, preparing any kind of mochi, for anyone other than oneself, surely does require complete and absolute adoration, since the effort involved is considerable.

The mochi pictured below was not made in the traditional manner, (that would have required a large wooden bucket and a heavy mallet for pounding the rice grains into an elastic and glutinous paste), mochi produced in this way is normally something done at New Year, but believe me, this was no springtime stroll through  'Sakura Park' either.

Instead of using the traditional method, 'from scratch,' with whole grains of rice, we started the process with some powdery rice flour, slowly added water and some fine sugar, then, beginning with O-hashi (chopsticks), we mixed the two together. When the mixture eventually congealed into a lump and became more difficult to work, the chopsticks were discarded, and the mixture was worked by hand. Lots of heavy pounding (and equally heavy breathing) ensued.

The next stage required us to break the  'dough-ball' into lesser portions, which were then rolled into small balls and steamed on a cloth for about twenty minutes, a bit like dumplings.

The corners of the cloth enabled the rice 'dumplings' to be safely removed from the hot pan, and tipped into a bowl. Then, with the steaming cloth now chilled with cold water, and wrapped around the knuckles, the rice mixture was pounded together into one lump again. When it was cool enough to handle without the cloth, it was worked in on itself again, very hard, with the heel of the hand, in repeated foldings, in a manner similar to that of kneading bread.

After that, the mixture was divided in half, and one part was coloured with a small quantity of red food colouring, which tinted the mixture cherry-blossom pink, while the other half remained white.

Both halves were then rolled (separately) into square shapes of the same size, and then the pink layer was placed over the white one.

Finally, these layers were rolled into a long cylinder with a bamboo mat. A protective layer of cling-film was first wrapped around the dough, to prevent the mixture from sinking through the skewers of the mat.

After a short while, the roll was quartered, and then sliced into rounds of about 1cm thickness. Each slice revealed a pink spiral design, reminiscent of the pattern seen in pinwheel scones.

And there you have it! Sakura blossom mochi... prepared with love by the strong arms of the devoted... Not quite sure what the men in your life will make of the colour though.