Little Miss Bento

My Melody Raspberry Steam Cakes (Japanese mushipan)! A no bake recipe that is easy and super fun to make. 

Do you know My Melody? She is a character created by Sanrio, a little girl rabbit that always wears a pink or red hood that also covers her ears.

I love my food cute! :P

Decided to take a rest from bento making today and made these Japanese steam cakes this morning! 

今日はマイメロディの蒸しパンを作りました。今度新しいレシピを試しました。得意になった、レシピは投稿します。今回はブラックココアパウダーをつかないので、木炭粉を使いました。そして、ラズベリーピューレを生地に入れたんです。

Doing some recipe testing this time round so I did not include the tutorial this time. I didn’t think that they are perfect yet, so once I refine and do some adjustments to the recipe, I hope to make and post again. 

My steam cake recipes so far use Morinaga hotcake mix, the texture of the cooked steam cake resembles our local Ma Lai Gao (as in Malay cake). 

Here is showing how the cake texture looks like when cooked. 

I do hope to work on a non-hotcake mix recipe and if it is successful I will share more with you :)

What I did differently today, is to use charcoal powder in replacement of dark cocoa powder. I would recommend the latter, however as dark cocoa powder is not available in Singapore, so I wanted to see if there could be a replacement for it. 

So, in today’s My Melody steam cakes, the dough for the eyes and mouth features had charcoal powder added to it. 

I also used freshly blended raspberry puree for the pink dough!

This is a photo of the cakes before going into the steamer.