Baked Chinese New Year Cake Recipe
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Chinese New Year cake is known in Mandarin as nian gao (“higher year”), and eating a piece of it is supposed to improve your luck in the coming year. Similar in texture to mochi, our untraditional version is a baked coconut cake that has a moist, almost bouncy quality.
For the more traditional recipe, try our Steamed Chinese New Year Cake.
What to buy: Sweet rice flour, also known as glutinous rice flour or mochiko, is produced from sticky rice grains and is actually gluten-free. It’s available at Asian markets in the starch section. Regular rice flour, which is produced from long-grain rice, will not yield the same results.
We prefer to use organic coconut extract, such as this one from Flavorganics, rather than imitation extract, which has a chemical aftertaste.
This recipe was featured as part of our Chinese New Year Dishes recipe slideshow.
- 2 tablespoons shredded, sweetened coconut
- 4 large eggs
- 1 pound sweet rice flour (about 3 cups)
- 3 cups whole milk
- 2 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus extra for coating the baking dish
- 1 teaspoon coconut extract
- 1/4 teaspoon fine salt
- Heat the oven to 350°F and arrange a rack in the middle. Coat a 13-by-9-inch baking dish with butter; set aside.
- Place the coconut in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake until toasted and golden brown in color, about 5 minutes; set aside.
- Place the eggs in a large bowl and lightly beat to break up the yolks. Add the remaining ingredients and whisk until smooth, about 2 minutes. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish and bake for 25 minutes. Sprinkle with the toasted coconut, rotate the dish, and bake until the edges are just starting to brown and the top is just set (a bubble may form, but it will flatten as the cake cools), about 20 to 25 minutes more.
- Remove from the oven and let cool for 30 minutes before serving. Wrap leftovers tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate.
I made this for a new year's party I went to in February and everyone loved it.
I have a similar recipe that used 1/2 cup of veg oil instead of the butter. In terms of milk, the almond milk doesn't give enough flavor as the whole milk, but certainly would work. I hope this will help.
Does anyone here know if this can be made nondairy with almond milk and some kind of oil for the butter? It seems like it would turn out well, but I thought I might ask first...
For those interested, we've added a link to the recipe for a more traditional Steamed Chinese New Year cake. Enjoy!
Christine Gallary, CHOW Test Kitchen
This does look like butter mochi, not nian gao. Melanie Wong's photo looks like the nian gao we make (and it's always steamed, I've never even heard of baked). This recipe does look taaty, just not authentic Chinese Lunar New Year food.
haha
i think my explain is very clear aboub what "gao" means in china
again, in china, all the cakes, as well as bread, puddings, pies, tarts, including what you mentioned "mochi", all of them no matter baked or steamed, floured or not, they could be all called "gao"
therefore, it does make sence that this funny little cake being called "gao"
if you do not konw chinese language, please do a research first, then come to tell us, what is "gao"
by the way, i dont care where "mochi" come from. there is only one chinese lunar new year in the world, not japanese new year, not hawaii new year, but chinese new year, thats enough!
!!!
As a couple of people mentioned above, this is a variation on butter mochi. I'm not sure if this originated in Hawaii, but I've been told it did. In all likely hood it is one of those "happa" recipies, with a geneology coming from various sources. Mochi, this way or the traditional pounded, is japanese, not chinese. Still it is a rice based baked good (pastry?) But calling it Gao, is sort of like calling three bean salad a variation of minestrone, after all it's still made out of beans, and this is still made out of rice flour.
Don't get me wrong, I love butter mochi. It's good. This looks like a good recipe. But it's not Gao.
haha
could i say something?
i am a chinese, i come from south east coast of china, only in this part of china, the farmers will make "nian gao" after autumn harvest for feting ancestors and celebrating chinese lunar new year. because only in south east of china, farmers plant sweat rice, which is ingredients of making "niangao". i think thats why, in this recipe, this baking stuff called "nian gao", because it uses sweat rice flour for baking. however the fact is, "nian gao" it is from steaming, not baking.
i will still thanks to author, it does not matter this cake is "nian gao" or not, the importance is that we never forget our traditional festival and the sweat rice flour will always make you remind your south east hometown. thats enough!
by the way, here another linguistics problem i want to clear for auther is, in chinese language, "nian" means "year", "gao" means "cake" but also means "higher,better, richer and all souts of better things ", why? because chinese language is a pictographic characters, you can not tell a word meaning only by its pronounciation. therefor, "nian gao" in chinese language means "a cake which will bring better or higher luck to you in next year", in other words, this carke will give you "a better or higher year"
so , i think it makes sense that autor translate "nian gao" into "higer year", it is not a mistake, it is a free or loose translation. but it makes sense.
Ohhh, I kept wondering what Mandarin word for "higher" sounded like "nian" when I read the comments but now I see that they mistook the word "cake" for "higher"! That's super funny.
This actually looks like a Vietnamese cassava coconut cake (Banh Khoa Mi). It's actually quite good, however we use cassava root, hence the name, for starch. Also, mung beans is used as well. The picture above looks like it, but the recipe is quite different. I don't believe we use this cake for new years either.
Anyways, hope everyone had a good lunar new year!
Steve, I think most of these negative comments comes from the fact that each New Year's dish has a meaning behind it. Somewhat in the way that a Thanksgiving turkey represents something.
Every year my mother takes such pride in preparing traditional dishes because they mean something. She would never change up a dish to represent another because it would be wrong.
It would've been much better to put an authentic recipe or a much closer adaption on the site.
I think the negative comments are unfortunate. This may not be "authentic," but the recipe looks interesting and the taste will stand on it's own. I just don't see the harm in trying to create something that is reminiscent of something else. It is in keeping with the spirit of the lunar new year while adapting a special item to the recipe author's taste. Let's lighten up and give each other a hand in enjoying something that's just a little different. I think the recipe looks fine!
Cheers,
Steve
http://yourfoodchoices.wordpress.com
Hey, since you took the time to change the title a bit and explain that it's a "variation", it's probably best if you change it again to take out "Chinese New Year" and just put in "coconut rice flour". Because seriously, I can only see ignorant people embarrassing themselves with this cake to people who actually celebrate Chinese/Lunar New Year.
We got a similar recipe from my late grandmother about 30 years ago that was an "innovation" circulating among her senior group in San Francisco. There are many kinds of "gao" besides nian gao. Perhaps the error was calling this one nian gao to start with.
Here's the nian gao that my mother make.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/melaniew...
For what it's worth, I grew up eating the traditional steamed versions, but recently my traditional chinese grandmother has decided to update her chinese new year's cake to a baked coconut milk version. She still calls it nian gao and likes it better than the traditional plain steamed ones. I still like the old style better, but that's just me (and I still put a smile on when she hands me an updated 'nian gao' for new years).
I made it! Actually, it's not really a cake either. Maybe a bar cookie but a little too sticky to eat with your fingers. The family liked it but we have never had a 'cake' with this kind of dense, rubbery texture so DH referred to it as gummy bear cake. It tastes like custard pie with coconut flavoring but without a crust.
The 'gao' is the word for cake, not 'high' though they are homophones in Chinese. Nian gao is traditionally not baked, it's steamed.
It does note its not traditional, but why not just call it another cake...rather than a nian gao?
My wife's from Malaysia and she buy this reddish rubbery block that she cuts into small piece and dips into a batter of rice flour, eggs & water. Which she then fries in oil in a pan. It turns gooey and tastes fantastic. Very sweet and can only be bought around Chinese New Year.
well, heck, I was going to make the recipe to use the sweet rice flour I bought for unknown or forgotten reasons but only the instructions print, not the ingredients. I hand wrote the ingredients. This looks like a nice alternative to custard pie.
Another error is that nian gao does NOT mean “higher year”; it means "new year cake", it just sounds the same as "higher year".
You're all right in that this is a nontraditional take on nian gao, and we've changed the headnote to be more clear about that.
Ditto that from soygirl2, this is a butter mochi recipe. I grew up in Hawaii and have a bunch of local cookbooks with this recipe or a close variation of it using butter & mochi & coconut. I have a real gao recipe if anyone cares, and it may be suitably "anglofied" as it calls for the addition of canned yams to the rice flour.
Let's hear a response from Louisa Yue?
This is not the Nian Gao that I grew up with. The colour is all wrong and who puts eggs and butter in Nian Gao? There were no eggs and butter in the old days in China. This must be some idiot's attempt to sell nian gao to white people.
This actually looks a lot like Hawaiian butter mochi or Filipino bibingka with the eggs and coconut, but not Chinese nian gao. Still looks pretty tasty, regardless of origin. Our family makes a sweet steamed nian gao for Chinese New Year. We dredge the pieces in an egg batter and fry it up (similar to French toast). Anyone else do this as well?
All of the nian gao that I am familiar with is the savory variety (i'm chinese), and you don't even make it yourself. You just buy the rice ovalettes. Sweet nian gao is really not as popular as the salty ones, and the sweet ones that do exist, are nothing like this...
wow... editors of CHOW i'm kinda dissapointed. This recipie is REALLY off the mark for Nian Gao - which has stickly rice flour, peen tong, sometimes red dates and is steamed. I'm not sure what this is, but it's certainly not chinese.
I know many varieties of nian gao, and they are all pretty much steamed, never baked. They do not have a drop of milk, butter or egg in the batter either.
Just to be fair, though, I came across a baked sticky, gooey type of "Chinese cake" made with rice flour, exactly once in my life. It was made by a Chinese colleague for the company potluck.
The ones I have eaten have had red azuki beans, too. Are there other variations?
Sorry, but this ain't nian gao. Not even close.