Ichigo Daifuku

Now, I've never been very good with my hands. When I was in primary school, we had to make a glasses case for Father's Day, embroidered with our dad's name, with chain stich (or at least I think that's what it was called). With my obvious disadvantage, being retarded in the area of craft-handiness, I was working extra hard. After half an hour of solid work, I got up, and looked down. Only to find that I had embroidered the thing onto my dress as well as the glasses case.

This is a hilarious anecdote, still recalled by my friends whenever my name and handicrafts pop up in the same sentence.

So fully aware of my disability, I've always been wary of cooking. But I was entirely seduced by the seemingly effortlessness of Obachan's ichigo daifuku that I had to have a go.

Daifuku is a type of wagashi, which is a Japanese sweet. These are mochi (glutinous rice cake) filled with an assortment of traditional Japanese flavourings, such as azuki (red bean, my dessert arch-nemesis). These are traditionally served at tea ceremony, as a counterpoint to the frothy and bitter matcha used.

Daifuku (大福餅, Daifukumochi) means good luck, and can be given at special occasions. Ichigo means strawberry.

Obachan's recipe called for shiroan, a white bean paste. Searching high and low at my local Asian grocery, I found all sorts of interesting paste-like things, but none were white bean. So, being the versatile cook that I am, I substituted it with a flavour that's familiar to Asian kids everywhere, hopefully. Lotus paste is traditionally used in moon cakes and sweet buns. It's a tan colour, with a texture that is similar to azuki paste, and has a light, sweet flavour with a slight accent of caramel, due to its process of being cooked with caramalised sugar.

Unfortunately, due to my exceptionally messy hands, I couldn't take pictures of the process.

The biggest challenge was the stickiness of the glutinous rice mixture. Man, they don't call it glutinous for nothing, do they? It's pretty difficult to get all of it out of the bowl and testing of my upper body strength to knead it properly.

Also, the properties of mochi are highly mysterious. Its rubbery tecture makes it really hard to make it into a thin disc, big enough to wrap around the filling of strawberry and lotus paste. And when you do, and try to pinch together the edges to form a seal, it's quite tricky to make it stick together, even though it sticks pretty darn well to the mixing bowl.

Anyway, it was a pretty laborious task, but I got it done eventually, and the results weren't half-bad, according to my guinea pig #1, my ever lovable grandma/sous chef.

So here you go, ichigo daifuku.

Definitely not as pretty as Obachan's, but not horrendously inedible either. I tentatively call it a success. But I'll report back after further testing. Tonight we're having a big family dinner, so I've made one for everyone (evil laugh).

Edit: Well, everyone approved! I made them all eat the daifuku before dinner, so they'd be more likely to think it was nice on an empty stomach (good marketing ploy, eh)? Both my aunts asked me for my recipe, too and complimented me on the texture of the mochi skin.

So, to my friends, hopefully you'll be lucky enough to taste my daifuku some time in the near future. Thanks again to Obachan for a recipe that made my family smile.