Mugwort mochi

Someone on Pinterest put up a link to a recipe for yomogi mochi – a Japanese dessert of sweet rice flour flavored with Artemisia princeps powder and filled with red bean paste. Since the traditional species of Artemisia was not conveniently in my cupboard, I tried it with good ol’ Artemisia vulgaris instead.

A couple notes:

• My food processor was not up to the task of making powdered mugwort. So I made a strong mugwort tea and used that instead of the water in the recipe.
• Internet mochi recipes that have been adapted for American cooks (I started with this one) seem to call for 1 cup mochiko : 1 cup water. This is waaaay too wet. I used a 16 oz. box of mochiko (2 cups + oh shit dump in the rest of the box when I realized how ridiculous the dough was) and 2 cups of mugwort tea.
• I did not freeze the red bean paste. This was a mistake, it would probably have been easier to form the mochi around a more solid ball of stuff
• Making mochi is hard. Keeping my hands constantly coated in corn starch helped somewhat.

The dough:bean-paste ratio in my mochi is too high, but other than that, they turned out pretty good (first two disastrous attempts at mochi-folding not shown). The mugwort and red bean taste good together. I have a lot of red bean paste left so I’ll probably try this again in an easier form factor, like crepes.