Niangao (aka Mochi Cake)

Author Notes

While growing up, my mom often made this baked niango, or “mochi cake,” to bring to potlucks with other Taiwanese-American families. Since most Asian desserts are not very sweet, this was always a special treat for me and my more Americanized sweet tooth. The consistency was always very chewy (a texture called “QQ” in Taiwan), and my mother usually studded the cake with dollops of sweetened red bean paste. I know a lot of Westerners can’t abide the idea of sweetened beans as a dessert, so I’ve made it an optional ingredient, but if you know, you know good it is.

This cake is traditionally eaten for the Lunar New Year because niango is a homonym in Chinese for “year” and “high." Thus, eating it at the beginning of the year was supposed to bring forth an auspicious year. There are many different kinds of niango: Shanghainese niangao is a dense, savory rice cake that is sliced up and stir-fried with meat and vegetables. And usually sweet niangao is steamed rather than baked, but my mom found it easier to bake due to the ubiquitousness of ovens in American kitchens. She said that the results were always more consistent than with steaming. The addition of butter in this recipe makes it very similar to Hawaiian butter mochi, but this version uses milk instead of coconut milk, and I find it to be generally less sweet.

My favorite part of niangao is the crusty edges, so I’ve started baking it in my Baker’s Edge brownie pan to maximize the crust:center ratio. I’ve also found that the type of glutinous rice flour used makes a difference. I usually love Mochiko sweet rice flour, but I find that I get a crustier niangao if I use Thai glutinous rice flour; just make sure you grab the green bag instead of the red bag, which is regular, non-glutinous rice flour. —Joy Huang | The Cooking of Joy