An Experiment with Mochiko & Pluots/Plums

So I've been wanting to replicate Citizen Cake's Ume Mochi Cake from a few years ago, but haven't been able to find any remotely similar recipes, save for a few for a traditional Hawaiian butter coconut mochi cake. The Demolition Desserts cookbook also isn't out until October, so no luck there.

Luckily I have an Asian mother, and she just happened to have two boxes of mochiko and a can of coconut milk lying around. I also helped my little sister move into Berkeley last weekend, and the super DC happened to have really sweet plums and pluots (they never had such good fruit when I went to school! Shafted!). I happen to use a very large purse, and the 14 plums/pluots I took (not stole - I could've theoretically eaten them all in one sitting...) fit nicely, albeit a bit heavily. So I was super ready to make my plum mochi without spending a dime! Except for some plum wine I got from J-town after my coworker suggested using it.

So I made 3 versions: the traditional butter-coconut that had an actual recipe, a cake based on that but instead of using coconut milk using pluot puree (the pluots were sweeter than the plums) + heavy cream + choya, and another using less puree and more cream & choya. The 2 plum versions are pictured above, but unfortunately one of my roommates really liked the coconut one and ate it all!

I also bought black sesame seeds and toasted/grinded them with some sugar and water to create a paste = YUMMY. I LOVE LOVE LOVE black sesame and kept eating it while I was making it. So good.

So I'm not sure how I feel about the plum mochi. I don't really like it! The version that used less puree was better, mostly because I don't really like the sweetness that the baked fruit brought (I think sweetness from fruit is different than the taste of sugar). It tasted almost artificial, despite the fact that it wasn't at all! I thought about reversing it and doing a black sesame mochi cake (as opposed to a mochi ball with black sesame filling) and a plum sauce, but that's so... typical...and not what I was going for (i.e. Citizen Cake). Hmm I don't know!