Rose Mochi

So, I've been fooling around with some Asian recipes recently, and yesterday I made mochi. I started with the recipe from tworedbowls.com, which I found at Food52, a cooking site I trust. I would've made green tea-flavored mochi if I had had plain green tea powder on hand, but I didn't, so I opted for rose-flavored instead. I was thinking of masghati, a Persian sweet also made of starch, but flavored with rosewater, cardamom, saffron and pistachio nuts.

I mixed up a cup of mochiko (sweet rice flour), a cup of sugar, a half-teaspoon of baking powder, a cup of water, and half a can of coconut milk. That was the recipe as given. To color the mochi, I grated a little fresh beet into the water and then strained it out. To flavor it, I added a teaspoon of rosewater. I poured the whole business into a Pyrex greased with coconut oil, covered it with foil, and baked it for an hour at 275 degrees. After it was out of the oven and cool, I cut it into squares and tossed them in a bit of cornstarch so they wouldn't stick together.

When the mochi went into the oven, it looked like Pepto-Bismol and smelled overpoweringly of rosewater. I was worried that I had overdone both the flavoring and the coloring. But when I uncovered the baked mochi, all the pink was gone; instead, it was exactly the color and texture of raw boneless chicken breast. The flavor, on the other hand, was perfect. I don't like using artificial food colorings, so I guess I'm stuck with a vegan treat that tastes amazing but looks like raw meat.