Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
This is a Chinese style Red Bean Paste Pancake that normally serves in Chinese Dim Sum restaurants. However, over the years, I have found them harder to find. Most of the ingredients are very easy to get from supermarkets and the ready-made red bean paste can be bought from most Chinese supermarkets. Of course, if you don’t like red bean paste, you could get black sesame paste instead. Or try using Nutella!
Apam Balik, also called Min Chiang Kueh (面煎粿) is one of the local snacks from my childhood that I used to eat for breakfast or dessert. Nowadays, it is a very common kueh/snack you can find at shopping malls or at hawker centres. They can come in many different fillings like ground peanut, red bean paste, cheese, salted green bean paste, chocolate, black sesame seed and many more. It is more common/traditional to have ground peanuts as the filling. If you have a nut allergy, you might want to avoid some of the Asian desserts!
My preferred filling for Min Chiang Kueh is ground peanut. I had already bought a few packets of ready-made ground peanut with sugar while in Singapore last year so now was an opportunity to use it.
Many Chinese sweet desserts are quite light and refreshing. They are not very often found in the UK Chinese restaurants with plates of fresh fruits or fried banana fritters the more common options. I love eating sweet desserts after a heavy meal in Singapore especially like ice kachang, grass jelly and many more yummy delicious desserts.
I am really pleased to come across this Sago Pearls with Melon recipe from the Chinese Feasts & Festivals published by Tuttle Publishing. This is a cookbook that is divided into two sections, covering feasts and festivals. It also explains the significance of each dish and a delicious recipe for its preparation. There are 57 delicious recipes in this book and is very unique. Normally you will find food gourmet photos in cookbook but in this book, all the dishes are illustrated by watercolour. The contents are beautifully laid out and it also explains the most important festivals, including the Dragon Boat Festival, the Mooncake Festival and Chinese New Year in detail. I enjoyed just reading the book.
I chose to make this simple sweet dessert as I have all the ingredients at home! I have been wanting to make this sweet dessert for ages! I had bought a 500g packet of white sago beads in a Chinese supermarket. They do come in coloured sago beads too and can be kept for a long time.
I have never tried to bake a marble cake from scratch as it is often easier to use a pre-mix to bake with my children! We all love marble cake for its chocolate swirls in the cake! But there isn’t much choice of marble cake pre-mixes on the market.
Anyway, recently The Happy Egg Co have kindly sent me a signed copy of Eric Lanlard’s Totally Chocolate cookbook, which features all his favourite chocolate recipes! I was so excited when I saw this chocolate and vanilla marble cake recipe which also happened to be his first listed recipe. I was thrilled to make it from scratch!
The fabulous chef, Eric Lanlard also created Peanut Butter & Chocolate Egg Cups for the Happy Egg co which can be found on their website.
This week I decided to adapt a recipe from The Secret of Cookies by Gu Huixue and bake White Lotus Sandwich Cookies. Instead of using black dates, I am using the leftover white lotus paste I had from the Swiss Roll Snow Skin mooncake and Colourful Snow Skin mooncake. Also one of the ingredients is cake flour which I replaced with plain flour and a few other alterations.
This Chinese Almond Cookie recipe is for Red Tractor #RTChallenge.
Green bean soup was never one of my favourite desserts until I came to UK as this is the only dessert I know how to cook. Fairly simple! Soak the mung beans / green beans for a couple of hours or overnight before placing them into the slow cooker, with a 2 to 1 water to bean ratio. Cook it till soft and mushy. After which, add rock sugar or brown sugar. It is then ready to serve.
Valentines Day is approaching soon. Instead of buying an expensive gift to Mr C, I decided to make him a jelly heart as a treat! I bought the jelly mixture from a Chinese supermarket. It is called agar agar and is slightly firmer than other jellies which is good with moulding and cutting. I also bought a pack of heart shaped cookie cutters.
