Hera, here again,
for this misadventure, we'll be doing a Hong Kong favourite. Pudding cake
is steamed glutinous rice cake prepared in a palm-size bowl. It's sold
now pretty much in any Chinese pastry stores or street hawkers. Flavours
can vary but generally brown sugar, white sugar, and variations of the two with
filling such as red bean or coconut have been developed.
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| from http://www.wangtu.com/pic_zixun/techan/o201010211604546316.jpg |
This round we'll be making
the traditional brown sugar, then a few with red bean, and the rest with
coconut filling. On with the show. Take it away, BeaPea!
This time it's an
all-girls show, and night of reminiscing... of high school! Dundundun. It will
be Saki's first time joining us. I think we have already impressed her with our
lack of knowing what we're making (BeaPea), can barely read the instructions
(Guimauve) and don’t know how to convert the ingredients’ measurements (Hera).
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| Again, we found a old newspaper clipping of the recipe, no source again, sorries! Another HK newspaper maybe Sing Tao? |
We also don't know how many
servings this recipe makes. We also forgot the camera and tablet to begin with.
After fetching them from the basement, Saki promptly forgot where she put the
camera. We are a good team.
Hera: It's simple.
Saki: Sure.
It's good to know we all
have such faith in our abilities. Everything has been measured,
approximately,
and we're currently
just waiting for the sugar to melt
Hera is about to pour the
melted sugar into the dry ingredients. Drumroll please...
"I will come and stir when [the solution] looks stable," says Saki, whose favourite thing to do is apparently to flick things into people's faces. Guimauve totally trusts her. Hera is very hurt by Saki's lack of trust in her ability to pour molten liquid. Saki smells chicken broth, maybe she's having a stroke. Hera is having a great time, though!
Evidently there is
discrepancy between the picture that came with the recipe and mixture. We are
so far chalking this up to using different kind of sugar. Hera is trying to
subtly hurry Saki's stirring by insisting she is not trying to hurry her. ‘It's
our first try’ is how Guimauve is making sense of all this.
Hera is also having a stroke according to Saki because she says our mixture smells like walnuts to her. Our mixture has neither chicken broth nor walnuts. Guimauve had a brilliant idea that they could share an ambulance. "Mmmmmm, good," says Hera in her baby voice. I think that's a good sign?
Hera just said "and this part isn't in the recipe." Should we really be improvising? Apparently yes! We are adventurous folk, we ares. I believe this is the adding of the filling.
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This first batch shall be with coconut shreds. Saki wants one with 1.5 redbeans. How precise. Maybe she's
secretly German.
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| Coconut shred - slightly frozen because we forgot to thaw them. |
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| First, pour them into ramekins. |
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| Then spoon in desire filling. |
The cakes have been steaming for 10 minutes. "5 more minutes," says Hera.
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| Coconut! |
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| Close up on the coconut! |
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| mmmm....Red bean! |
Tick, tock, tick, tock... They've been removed from the
steamer.
Now comes the answer to
Hera's question 'what do we do now?' Next problem...how do we get these things
out of the containers? Hera's dad suggested poking it with a stick and pulling
it out. I suggested using a knife to scrape the sides and pat the bottom.
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| Looks like the knife on sides worked. Victory! |
Final thoughts: The coconut
ones don't seem to be firming up as well but we're taking them out now anyway.
The verdict is... it tastes like sticky sugar. Guimauve would like a little
more bounce in it, it's leaning a bit more towards the cake-y side of things.
Consensus is that it should have maybe spent more time in the steamer. The
second batch did, so we'll see if there is a difference. Apparently this one is
a bit more watery because there was condensation dripping into it. Also the red
beans are a bit hard. We may also have skimped on the flour. Third try is
coconut and red bean. Hera is having trouble getting it out of the ramekin. The
coconut one is a bit fluffier but it may have been the removal method, as it
did not come out in one piece. Still pretty successful, given we were
making things up as we went along!
Recipe
(Translation from article above):
100 g Rice Flour
½ Tbsp Glutinous Rice
Flour
50 g Non-glutinous flour
120 g Raw Cane Sugar (we
used the flat bar kind)
3 Tbsp red bean (pre-boiled to soften)
410 g water
1) Dissolve the sugar in
400 g of boiling water.
2) Mix all the flour
together then add in remaining 10 g of water and mix well into a paste.
3) Add the sugar mixture in
portions to the flour paste until everything is well incorporated.
4) Pour mixture into
ramekins (or heat proof bowls). In each bowl, spoon in red bean as
desired.
5) Place ramekins in
steamer, steam for 12 minutes or until firm.
