Today's dessert of the day is Mochi ice cream. Very popular in the United States, but originated from Japan. In the year 1981, Lotte was the first company to make Mochi ice cream in Japan. Now there is a manufacturer of Mochi in the United States and is called Mikawaya. This dessert is very common in Asian style restaurants. The first layer of the Mochi is a very soft, sticky dough, and inside of that dough is ice cream. The ice cream inside can vary, but the traditional flavors would be green tea, vanilla, and chocolate. But recently they have come out with peach, strawberry, mango, and red bean flavors.
Mochi ice cream is very compact, and easy to eat. Mochi ice cream generally weighs only two ounces, and is only two inches wide. The size of a mochi is almost the same size of a golf ball. It is considered a finger food dessert, but it can also be eaten with an eating utensil or a toothpick, it really depends on how you want to eat it. From my experience with eating Mochi, it tends to melt really fast, if you hold on to it for a long time, or if you are a slow eater, like me, when it comes to desserts with ice cream, it will get a little messy when eating this dessert.
I have also had the opportunity to try another version of Mochi, it is called Mochi Lato, and it's simply the Mochi dough, with gelatto in it. Which means that instead of ice cream, they have replaced it with gelatto, and gelatto is just sweeter and creamier than ice cream. I think that Mochilato is much more difficult to eat because it melts a lot faster than Mochi. The Mochilato that I visited was in Fullerton, CA, I haven't seen any around in the Bay Area.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochi_ice_cream#In_the_United_States
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goidudu/3237679120/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moviesofmyself/3533098719/
