Purple Yam Mochi Recipe - The Filling

I've been doing  a bit of dessert making...if you call popsicles dessert.  And a bit of cooking, yes, just a bit. And from that bit of cooking, I had some left over purple yams and knew I wanted to make a dessert out of them.  I love the bright purple colour, especially if you can see a bit of the purple through the skin.  So, here it is, purple yam mochi - the filling.

Ingredients
2 small purple yams steamed and skinned (approx 250g)
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup water

Instructions
Strain the yam through a sieve or puree in a food processor.
Heat on medium heat and add the sugar and water and stir until steam comes out and paste starts to bubble.  At this point you can decide if you want the purple yam filling to be thicker or thinner by cooking longer or adding a bit more water.
(I preferred a thinner filling this time so I only heated another minute.)
Cool and refrigerate.

Using 2 spoons or a tbsp scoop, scoop yam and roll into balls.  (Can dust hands with corn starch or glutinous rice flour if needed.)  Freezer or refridgerate till hardened.


Now to make the mochi skin.  I actually tried out two new methods:

1.  Method outlined over at Lady and Pups for sticky rice balls or "tang yuan" resulted in mochi pictured at the top.  But instead of serving in a sweetened broth/soup/sugar water as the per Lady and Pups, I ladled them out onto a bed of cornstarch to coat and wrapped in cling wrap when cool.  The texture was not bad, but I had to add more glutinous rice flour than the recipe called for which was noted in the recipe.

2.  Method outlined in the cookbook The Food of Taiwan.  It involves baking it in the oven which I thought was a pretty good idea.  But unfortunately the water to glutinous rice ratio didn't quite work out for me causing me to make some adjustments.  Because of the adjustments, my finished 'dough' was a little harder to work with and thus the shape of the mochi was a bit uneven.  I retested the recipe with a different brand of rice flour and still found the ratio to be off so went with what I know and it turned out well after baking.  Still think the book is great so far, just need to try a few more recipes to really make a review.



Baking the glutinous rice flour mixture.

If you'd rather use the microwave, Chocolate and Zucchini has a good one which I've used often but requires you to wrap the mochi while the glutinous rice is hot/warm which can be tricky.