The Best Chocolate Butter Mochi

Chocolate butter mochi is a chocolate mochi cake from Hawai’i. It’s chocolately, chewy, and super easy to make. This recipe makes one 9×13″ sheet cake of mochi, so bring it to a party or potluck! Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links.

**Updated in 2023**

What is Butter Mochi?

Being part Japanese-American, mochi of all kinds was a very familiar sweet treat for me, but this kind of mochi is actually from Hawai’i (with potentially some Japanese influences). Butter mochi is a Hawaiian dessert that originated from a mashup of various other Asian desserts. Apparently there’s some contention between whether butter mochi came from Japanese immigrants or Filipino, as it’s very similar to the Filipino dish bibingka. Given that both peoples have lived in Hawai’i for a very long time, who’s to say that’s it’s not both? Some fusion of the two? In any case, it’s delicious.

Japanese Church Cookbook Recipes

This chocolate butter mochi recipe is adapted from one of my old church cookbooks. I grew up going to a predominantly Japanese American church, where the Japanese American community there was a mishmash of more recent immigrants and Japanese Americans who had lived in Hawai’i or the West Coast for 4-5 generations! Plus, we had a lot of grandmas at this church. Which means that this cookbook is AMAZING. All the best recipes come from old Asian grandmas, yeah?

Chocolate Butter Mochi Ingredients and Method

For the ingredients, you need a one pound box of mochiko, which is about 2 and 1/2 cups. These days, you can find Blue Star Mochiko at most grocery stores, at least where I live. But if not, you can also find it on Amazon.

The cocoa powder I use in this recipe is dutch processed cocoa. Natural cocoa is lighter in color, flavor, and is naturally acidic. A lot of recipes using this cocoa powder call for baking soda, as it reacts with the acidity in the cocoa. Personally, I prefer dutch processed cocoa, which is a cocoa powder that has gone through a process to make it alkaline. This results in a darker color and fudgier flavor. Since this cocoa powder is alkaline, you should not use baking soda as a rising agent in these recipes. If you don’t feel like getting the dutch processed cocoa powder, you can definitely substitute just regular cocoa powder with no other changes to the recipe.

As for the technique, butter mochi is extremely simple to make – mix dry and wet ingredients separately, then together, than bake in a 9×13″ pan for an hour. It is chewy, buttery, and gluten free! The chocolate flavor is not too intensely dark like in a brownie, but it’s got that dense, fudgy bite to it while still holding together well when you cut it in pieces.

Is Chocolate Butter Mochi the Same as Mochi Brownies?

I define the difference between butter mochi and mochi brownie as the same difference between regular cake and brownies. Butter mochi is essentially a mochi cake and is lighter and spongier in texture. If you are looking for a denser, fudgier chocolate mochi treat, you should definitely check out my mochi brownie recipe!

More Butter Mochi Recipes

Need more butter mochi? Check these out:

• Classic Hawaiian Butter Mochi
• Custard Mochi
• Pumpkin Butter Mochi
• Matcha Butter Mochi
• Black Sesame Butter Mochi

Recipe Update 2023

This recipe was updated in 2023 to increase the chocolate flavor and fudginess. See recipe notes for the original, lighter and fluffier version.