A pumpkin recipe! Rarely do I share pumpkin recipes because I get overwhelmed by all the pumpkin recipes that surface the internet during the fall months and pumpkin just isn't my favourite ingredient. Don't get me wrong, I love using kabocha squash (or Japanese pumpkin) in a lot of my cooking and baking — kabocha cheesecake cream puffs, kabocha salted egg yolk sesame balls, and kabocha mooncakes —but I'll always choose kabocha over pumpkin for both flavour and texture. These pumpkin mochi cakes might be the only exception.
These 3-ingredient mochi cakes call for canned pumpkin purée (not pumpkin pie filling) that one would use to make pumpkin pie or muffins. It's a great way to use up any pumpkin purée you have leftover from other fall baking projects. Because there are no eggs involved, you can easily scale the recipe up (to make 20 mochi cakes) or down (to make 4 mochi cakes). Glutinous rice flour, or sweet rice flour, is added to the pumpkin purée to create the base of the mochi dough. It's important to get glutinous rice flour and not just regular rice flour so you get the chewy, sticky mochi texture. Granulated sugar is added to the mixture for a bit of sweetness and you can leave it at that if you like. I normally make it a plain pumpkin mochi but if I'm feeling fancy, I will make a simple 4-ingredient brown sugar filling (making this a 7-ingredient recipe!) for the mochi. The brown sugar filling is warm and sweet, much like the filling for a brown sugar pop tart. The mochi cakes are pan fried, giving them a crispy, golden exterior while the ...












