Coffee mochi bun was always a rare treat for me. We typically have bread in the morning so usually look for more savory breads that we could have with sweet fruit on the side. As a sweeter bread, mochi buns didn’t quite make the cut. In addition to the taste profile, they’re typically on the more expensive side in bakeries so that was an additional consideration when we were picking out our breakfast.
So, naturally, as something that I loved to eat, but couldn’t always afford, I figured out how to make it at home! This spin on the popular mochi bun is coffee flavored with a rich, buttery crust. The first time I tested the recipe, my taste testers inhaled the buns so quickly they didn’t have time to think through the taste and tell me what could be improved. The main notes they gave me were – this is soooo good. And that was just the first attempt!
The recipe we’re presenting to you today has been even further refined, and we’re confident you’ll get the same raving compliments as long as you follow the steps correctly.
What is coffee mochi bun?
Mochi buns are a type of bread with a chewy mochi filling. They can be found in Taiwanese bakeries and other Asian bakeries – that is, if you’re able to get there before they sell out. Oftentimes, mochi buns are baked with a sugar crust on top to add a buttery rich flavor and an additional crunchy texture. In one bite of the bun, you get three for one: airy soft bread, chewy mochi, and crunchy sugar crust.
The mochi filling is typically just plain mochi. Whether the mochi is sweetened might depend on the bakery. The outside bun is typically where you see more variation. I’ve come across chocolate, vanilla, brown sugar, even strawberry flavored mochi buns before. While those are all wonderful flavors that I would recommend trying out, today we’ll be teaching you how to make the coffee mochi bun.
Why this recipe?
Coffee mochi bun is a rare treat in bakeries, but with this recipe, you can make it a common staple of your kitchen. The sugar crust on our version of the bun makes for a beautiful gift if you want to share with friends, or just makes it extra appetizing for you when you enjoy it at home. This take on the mochi bun will be extra special because it’s a rarer flavor; prepare to wow all your charitable bellies with coffee flavored buns!
In our recipe, we’ll show you how to make every component of the coffee mochi bun from scratch! As with all our recipes, we include detailed pictures and instructions to help guide you through the baking process. This recipe has a lot of steps so these step-by-step instructions are extra critical to make sure you succeed the first time.
Be warned, this bread has a lot of components to work through so we did mark this as one of our harder recipes. There are three separate parts to make (dough, sugar crust, and mochi), which makes it easier for things to go wrong either in creating the individual components, or when you’re bringing all the pieces together. If you’re a newer baker, we recommend trying out our recipe for pineapple bread (either regular or chocolate flavored) first, before giving this one a shot.
Ingredients and Equipment for mochi bun
There’s a long list of ingredients in this recipe because there are three separate components. Fortunately, these ingredients should be easily accessible from your local grocery stores or are available online.
Bread Dough Ingredients
Of all the components, the dough is going to be the trickiest to get right. We’re aiming for an airy, soft bread. I elaborate more in this guide[link to Baking 201: Secrets] for working with enriched dough, but the gist of it is that there are a couple of key ingredients that will help you attain that texture:
- Cornstarch
- Butter
- Ground Ginger
For the rest of the ingredients include:
- Bread flour (all-purpose flour will also work in equal proportion, but the bread will not be as chewy)
- Milk
- Sugar
- Yeast
- Salt
Our flavor profile today is going to be coffee. You can use either espresso powder or instant coffee, whichever you happen to have on hand. If you’re deciding which one to get, just know that to some people espresso powder carries a slightly burnt taste while instant coffee tends to be more mild.
Crust Ingredients
The main components of the sugar crust are sifted cake flour and powdered sugar, bound together by room temperature butter and egg. I particularly stress sifting the cake flour and powdered sugar because the sugar crust is going to be the most visible part of the bread. Both cake flour and powdered sugar are prone to clumping, so if you don’t sift it, you will definitely end up with some ugly sores on your bread. Observe:
The other ingredients used in the sugar crust are to enhance the taste of the crust: milk powder and espresso powder or instant coffee. The coffee addition is a given since we’re making coffee mochi bread, but the milk powder may be a little confusing.
The addition of milk powder is to add some milky fragrance to the crust, while also working to help bind the crust together. Although the milk powder raises the sugar crust to another level, I would consider it the most optional component of the crust since there are other elements you can increase to get similar results. If you don’t have any on hand, this is one ingredient I would just skip adding. Alternatively, if you have some other milk powder at home (i.e. coconut milk powder, soy milk powder etc.), that can be substituted in at equal proportion.
Mochi ingredients
If you haven’t made mochi before, don’t be intimidated at making it from scratch. It only takes three ingredients: glutinous rice flour, warm water, and a few drops of oil.
The hard part of the mochi won’t be mixing it; it’ll be integrating it into the dough. Traditionally, mochi will be made with a higher proportion of water to flour. If we were to use the usual recipe, we’d end up trying to wrap our bread around mochi soup. While certainly possible, it’s not too probable we’d succeed, so instead we’ll be using a slightly modified version of the standard mochi recipe here.
If you’re curious on how to make your own mochi at home, check out our recipe for it here[link to mochi recipe]!
Equipment
If you have a bread machine or stand mixer with a dough attachment, this is a great place to use it since we’ll be working quite a bit of butter into the dough. If not, kneading by hand will also work!
In addition, you’ll also need two mid-sized bowls and spatulas for forming the sugar crust and mixing the mochi. You’ll also need some plastic food wrap and rolling pin to work with the sugar crust. A thicker rolling pin works best, but you can also just whatever you have on hand.
Cooking Process
There’s a lot of steps to go through so we’ve organized it into 5 phases to make it easier to track:
- Dough Preparation
- Crust Preparation
- Mochi Preparation
- Bun Shaping
- Crust Shaping and Baking
Bread Dough Preparation
To start off, measure all the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl if kneading by hand, or into the bread machine directly. Warm up the milk to 90-110 degrees, and mix in the espresso powder until fully dissolved. Add the milk to the dry ingredients and begin kneading. By hand, it’ll take around 15 minutes, by machine around 10 minutes.
As soon as the dough starts to clump together (around 2-3 minutes of kneading), start adding the butter in with small increments. When adding in the butter, wait until the small scoop of cutter is mostly incorporated before adding in more. If too much butter is added in at once, the dough can get too greasy and it will take longer to fully incorporate it.
Continue to knead the dough after all the butter has been added until it is fully incorporated. The dough is ready when it is only slightly oily to touch. Don’t worry too much about getting it to a completely smooth surface – it will even out as it rises.
Cover the dough and set it aside in a warm part of your kitchen. Wait for 1-2 hours for it to double in size.
Crust Preparation
While waiting for the bread dough to rise, we can make the crust dough. Using a hand whisk, whisk the butter in a medium-sized bowl until it’s light and fluffy. Add in the sifted powdered sugar and espresso powder. Continue to whisk until the powdered sugar and espresso powder is fully incorporated.
Add in the egg and whisk until the egg is broken up. The butter will slightly clump up when it comes in contact with the cold egg. This is okay – we’ll be mixing the dough later, which will help break apart the chunks.
Sift in the cake flour and milk powder and switch out for a spatula to mix the dough. Continue to mix until everything is fully incorporated. The dough will still be quite sticky at this point so I would avoid working it directly with your hands.
Lay out a piece of plastic food wrap, and then scrap the dough onto it. Fold one side of the plastic over the other so that you can wrap the dough. Twist the ends together tightly to make sure none of the dough escapes!
Place the wrapped dough in the freezer until it’s ready for use. The dough can stay frozen for up to a couple of months so it can be made in advance – in fact, the harder the dough is, the easier it will be to work with when shaping it.
Mochi Preparation
Preparing the mochi will be really quick! I usually just whip it together a couple minutes just before I’m ready to shape the buns.
Warm up the water and add in a little oil. The water doesn’t have to be too hot – it just makes it easier to knead the mochi together. Add the water to the dough and start mixing together. The mochi dough will stay fairly viscous so it’s easier to mix using the spatula instead of kneading by hand. The dough is ready whenever the glutinous rice flour and water is fully combined.
Bun Shaping
Take out the prepared dough, crust, and mochi and set out on your working area. The dough will still be very soft and easy to form so it can help to lightly flour the working area. Try to avoid adding in too much flour or else the coffee mochi buns will end out dry. Use a knife to cut the dough into 8 even pieces.
Taking one piece, gently roll into a small ball and set on the working area. Use a smalling rolling pin to roll out the ends of the dough ball. Roll outwards from close to the center – we don’t want to roll too close to the center because we want to end up with around a ratio of 2:1 in terms of outside to inside dough.
Hold the flattened dough in your palm, then scoop around 1-2 T of the mochi into the center of the dough. Pull the sides of the dough together and pinch them together. As the dough expands, the seams might come undone so I like to roll the pinched side of the dough on the working surface to seal it together. Using this approach, I haven’t had to deal with any more exploding coffee mochi buns anymore. 😀
Place the dough on the baking sheet, leaving enough room so that there will be about 2” apart from each other. Repeat until all of the buns are formed. Move the formed buns back to the warm part of your kitchen and let it continue to rest for 40 minutes. About a half hour into the resting time, you can preheat the oven. The before and after will look something like this:
Crust Shaping
When the dough has finished proofing the second time, we can add the crust to the top. To shape the crust, cut off a section of the frozen crust, about ¼” thick. Keep in mind that the crust ingredients are enough to cover 16 coffee mochi buns so you should still have a lot of crust left if making from a new batch.
Lay out two pieces of plastic food wrap and place the piece of crust between the wraps. Use a rolling pin to flatten out the crust. I find that a thicker rolling pin works best, but you can easily make do with a thinner rolling pin, or even a large plate in a pinch. Try to keep the crust as circular as you can, but don’t stress too much about it! The crust will spread out across the coffee mochi buns as it melts so it doesn’t have to perfect.
Gently peel away the top plastic food wrap, move slowly to keep the crust intact. Place the crust with the food wrap still attached to it on top of the bun, then slowly peel away the remaining piece of plastic food wrap. Tap down on the crust to make sure it keeps in place, then move on to cover the remaining coffee mochi buns. The crust will melt the longer it sits out which makes it harder to work with so try to move quickly.
Transfer the pan into the preheated oven and then bake for 19-22 minutes, or until the crust has turned golden brown. Once it’s finished baking, remove from the oven and let cool on the pan before transferring to a rack to continue cooling. Enjoy as soon as it’s cool enough to eat!
final thoughts on mochi bun
Coffee mochi buns take some time to make, but in my opinion, freshly baked ones are completely worth the effort! Once you get the hang of it, the process will actually go very quickly, especially if you’re able to make the crust in advance.
The coffee mochi buns will be good for up to five days, but the crust may lose its crispiness. You can just pop the buns into the toaster oven or air fryer to crisp it up again! Hope you and your charitable bellies enjoy this coffee mochi bun!
Coffee Mochi Bun
Ingredients
Bread Ingredients
- 2 c bread flour
- 1 t cornstarch
- 3 T butter room temperature
- ¾ c milk warmed
- 3 T sugar
- 1 ½ t espresso powder
- ¾ t yeast
- ¼ t ground ginger
- ½ t salt
Sugar Crust Ingredients
- 1 c cake flour
- 8 T butter unsalted
- ½ c powder sugar
- 3 T milk powder
- ½ t espresso powder
- 1 egg
Mochi Ingredients
- ⅔ c glutinous rice flour
- ⅓ c water warmed
- ¼ t oil
