Dulce de Leche Brown Butter Mochi and Mature Themes

Let's get suggestive

Jun 13, 2021

What a week!

To show gratitude to my subscribers on this inaugural week of The Stew, I present a deeply chaotic and hopefully very fun combination of things that have been rattling around in my brain.

This represents a break from the usual content you’ll see and, I must warn you, it’s pretty horny. I’m referring to the quasi-erotic fiction I’m including here, but mostly I’m talking about the recipe. Because, wow, this mochi butter cake is explicit.

Fair warning

Something you may not know about me, even if we’re acquainted IRL, is that I have written creatively for some time in addition to making educational/condemnatory/ infuriated/SJW-y content. The Stew is my quirky daughter; what follows is her cool aunt.

Below you will find two things that I want desperately to propel into the world but for which I hadn’t yet found the right place. Nothing ties these two elements together aside from my deranged sensibility. I hope you enjoy.

CW

A note on content: My prose (within which any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental) contains references to drug use, a brief PG-13 sexual interlude, and is altogether extremely gay. The recipe that follows it is rated R.

You should’ve asked (2019)

If you’ve never watched a man in smeared makeup stumble to the bathroom to do coke, you’re probably straight.

Kevin smelled like artificial watermelon and had either a tiny bladder or an uncompromising commitment to cocaine. Perhaps, as is often the case, the truth lies someplace betwixt. My memories are of him in a state of perpetual interruption. He constantly excused himself from any situation to pee, to do a bump; who’s to say? Upon returning, the artificial watermelon smell would reassert itself, pleasantly cloying, persistent. He didn’t appear to be constantly wired, but perhaps I didn’t know him well enough to establish a baseline for comparison. I never, for instance, asked after the source of his watermelon smell.

He offered me coke on only one occasion during a Halloween party for which I dressed as No-Face from the Miyazaki film, Spirited Away. I wore all black and fashioned a paper plate into a mask. I was, and remain, more concerned with looking hot than being effective. He didn’t wear a costume but had made up his face in a way that was chaotic in its laziness. He snuck me away (I enjoy any excuse to leave a party) to make out in a brown-carpeted attic that also served as a wardrobe for, I assume, the world’s most aggressively ironic teenaged grandfather.

We made out and fondled erections over our clothes for a few minutes before, predictably, Kevin came up for air. “Pee or coke?” I silently asked myself. This time, it was coke. He offered me a bump and took out the telltale baggie - a mystery plastic, neither Ziploc nor Saran. Organically spastic as I am, I declined. He got cagey at this point and suggested he would run to the bathroom. Because I am a voyeur in every way except sexually, I welcomed him to do so right there and then, but he demurred. He jangled his way down the narrow staircase and I lay back on the brown carpet, waiting impatiently for his return.

Dulce de leche brown butter mochi cake

Bestie, do I have a fucking treat for you. Unearth that Instant Pot your stepmom got you for Christmas and buckle the hell up. We’re in for a sweet-ass, gluten-free-ass ride.

As far as I can gather from my extremely limited research, making dulce de leche without an Instant Pot takes days or weeks, requires some manner of perpetual motion device, and robs you of your firstborn child. Suffice it to say that I won’t be detailing how to make dulce de leche without an Instant Pot (don’t @ me). You can also make the recipe with just sweetened condensed milk.

By some 40-minute-long alchemical process, the Instant Pot transmutes the humble can of condensed milk into thick, treacly DDL (DON’T @ ME) ready for implementation in your butter mochi cake or spooned directly into your gaping craw. A miracle, by all accounts.

This recipe is adapted from the charming hawaiian-culture-stories.com. Butter mochi is a staple dessert in Hawai’i, the result of an orgiastic syncretism of Japanese and Hawaiian confectionary traditions. Everyone who makes it has their own recipe and variations. Shredded coconut is a traditional addition both in the batter (add 1 cup to the recipe below, if you’d like to try it) and atop the finished cake, but I prefer it without. My biggest contributions are the additions of brown butter and dulce de leche, for which I should be arrested. I regret nothing.

Ingredients

1 14oz can sweetened condensed milk

1 stick unsalted butter, melted and browned

325g granulated sugar

1 15oz can full-fat coconut milk

1/2 cup water

4 whole eggs plus 2 egg yolks

1 box, 16oz, Mochiko rice flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

Directions

First, prepare the dulce de leche. Remove the label and scrub the glue from the can of sweetened condensed milk. Place a trivet or a kitchen towel in the chamber of the Instant Pot and nestle in the can. Cover to the max volume fill line. Cook on high pressure for 40 minutes. Allow the steam to release naturally or manually; it doesn’t matter. Processed cans are shelf stable, so prepare this as far in advance as necessary.

Next, prepare the brown butter. I should note that browning the butter is wholly unnecessary to the integrity of this recipe, but you have to melt the butter regardless, so, why not? To brown the butter, melt over medium heat until liquified, then use one or both of the following cues: the sound of the bubbling will transition from rapid and crisp to intermittent and burbling; the color will change from sunny yellow to golden brown and rust-colored deposits of browned milk sugars will accumulate on the bottom of the pot (I recommend watching the butter like a hawk once it melts completely, as browned butter turns to burned butter rather quickly). At this confluence of stages, remove from heat and allow to cool. When the time comes, be sure to scrape all the bits off the bottom into the batter.

Now preheat your oven to 350ºF and line the bottom of a 13x9” metal baking pan with parchment paper.

Combine all of the wet ingredients in a large bowl (per the ingredient list, from the condensed milk/dulce de leche to the eggs; sugar is a wet ingredient) and stir until homogeneous and smooth. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until fully combined. There is no danger of over-mixing, so have at it.

Pour the batter into the lined baking pan and place in the center rack of your preheated oven. Bake until the cake has pulled away from the sides and the top has bronzed to a deep golden color, about 45 minutes. This recipe bears a fair amount of over-baking without issue, so a few minutes over (up to an hour) will still yield a fabulous if dark-tasting result.

This recipe cuts into beautifully sharp and photogenic angles. I serve it in 2x2” squares as it is appallingly rich and I am very modest and dainty. You’ll want to eat the whole batch, though. You have been warned.

Postscript

Was this fun for you? Sound off in the comments/DMs/emails if you liked this and want more random malarkey from time to time. Thanks for reading <3

The Stew