Dessert

Chinese Almond Cookies

dianakuan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:42:36 +0000

Note to self: Never bake cookies before breakfast, especially if you are starving.

Yesterday, faced with the prospect of no milk accompaniment for cornflakes, I decided to hold out until lunch. I wanted to try out a recipe for almond cookies and told myself I would only eat 1 or 2, then fix myself a sensible lunch. However, hunger and gluttony got the best of me, and I ended up wolfing down eight.

You live, you learn.

My father used to own a Cantonese bakery and he would make these enormous, 5-inch wide crisp almond cookies with an egg-y sheen. I wanted more manageable-sized cookies, so I tried a recipe out of Chinatown: Sweet Sour Spicy Salty, a book I borrowed from the school I teach at. A recipe from the book I tried before was a dud, but fortunately this one turned out fine, giving me crisp and buttery textured cookies.

The only alteration I made was adding a half cup of ground almonds for a more nutty flavor. Although next time methinks I should replace the all-purpose flour with almond flour from Carrefour's enormous flour selection. (Or cashew flour, or even goji flour. Ah, Carrefour. What unusual flour don't you have?)

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Other cookie recipes to try:

Rose Tea Dessert Soup

dianakuan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:07:14 +0000

I'm sure most Westerners who have ever dined with a group of Chinese are familiar with the the following scenario. After a ___-course lavish banquet, you look forward to something nice and sweet to cap off a great experience. Your Chinese hosts inform you that you'll love the dessert; all Westerners love dessert. This one is a Chinese specialty. Anticipation mounts. Then the long-awaited dessert arrives...in the form of red bean soup. You take one sip, utter an "Mmm!" with all the false bravado you can muster, and wonder if anyone will notice you "watering" that plant close by.

Yes, it is well known that most Chinese desserts are merely tolerated by Westerners. While I personally don't mind red bean soup or other sweet dessert soups every once in a while, other people, like a certain significant other of mine, have developed an intense fear of them. It's understandable. While in the West we crave and lust after rich chocolates, cakes, and pies, the Chinese palate can tolerate only moderately sweet things. Thus, Chinese desserts never seem sweet enough, but anyone living or traveling extensively in China can't help but encounter them again and again.

Not long ago I picked up an outdated Chinese cooking magazine from the bargain bin of a magazine stand. I was enamored of the existentialist thought-provoking photos inside, such as this gem:

Lychee Rum Clafoutis

dianakuan — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:48:28 +0000

Cherries, of course, are the fruits used in the most classical French preparation of clafoutis. As recently as 2 weeks ago, black cherries were in abundance all over my local markets. I bought them for eating whole, for making black cherry iced tea, but not for baking. Now it's too late, and the only cherries left are rotten-looking and expensive.

Yesterday at the grocery store I grabbed some lychees, which still seem to be semi-abundant. Not best looking lychees ever, but good enough for Beijing. Lychees hold their shape very well when baked, so I just soaked them in rum and made tropics-influenced clafoutis with a coconut milk custard. They took longer to bake than I thought, because the deepness of my ramekins. But they did make my kitchen, and entire apartment for that matter, smell like lychees. Really, there is no need for scented candles or home fragrance sprays when you live with a baker.

Birthday Pudding

dianakuan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:15:20 +0000

I can't celebrate today without also paying tribute to someone else who shares the same birthday. The late M.F.K. Fisher, arguably the best American food writer of the 20th century, would have turned 100 today. If you haven't read anything by her already, do it, starting with The Gastronomical Me. Her enthusiasm for food and eloquence with words have no parallel.

The last book of hers I finished was A Stew or a Story, a collection of short magazine pieces. In one essay about picnics, her al fresco dessert suggestion was a chilled chocolate mousse. I liked the recipe for two reasons: 1) No heavy cream, which is hard to find within walking distance, and 2) Because the recipe was written before the ubiquity of electric mixers, it assumes that you will mix and whip everything by hand.

I hadn't whipped egg whites in far too long, so my forearm got a workout getting the whites to soft peak. The old-fashioned simplicity of the recipe did seemed nice, I thought. I just melted the chocolate, stirred in the egg yolks and rum and vanilla, and folded in the egg whites. The puddings were all set to pop into the fridge to chill for 12 hours.

Hibiscus Mint Granita with Rum

dianakuan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:54:06 +0000

I guess I could have also called this Hibiscus Mojito Granita, but that sounds a little hokey.

My experimentations with tea desserts continue. Since my Rose Tea Rice Pudding was a success, I moved on to hibiscus tea, another tisane I bought at Maliandau, Beijing's tea street.

Hibiscus tea is also known as roselle in Southeast Asia, red sorrel in the Caribbean, and karkady in the Middle East. Among other benefits, it contains vitamin C and is believed to lower blood pressure. All that is wonderful, but my main concern on yesterday's 30 degrees Celsius afternoon, was how to incorporate hibiscus into a frozen dessert.

I don't own an ice cream maker. Heck, I don't even know where to find one in Beijing. But to make a granita, all you need is a fork and the ability to mash a bunch of ice with it. Quite simple, quite fit for a Luddite foodie.

Originally this granita was going to include just hibiscus and a splash of lemon juice. Then I recalled seeing a recipe for Hibiscus Mojitos a few months ago. Well, why not add some mint and rum in here as well?

Rose Tea Rice Pudding, a Persian-Chinese Concoction

dianakuan — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:00:59 +0000

A few months ago I wrote about my obsession with rose tea, also called rosebud tea. Not to be confused with rose hip, or the those things your boyfriend is supposed to give you for Valentine's Day, rose tea uses the buds from a rose bush. 玫瑰茶 (meigui cha) is usually blended with black tea or other herbal teas, but I think it's great on its own.

Since I moved to Beijing, I would drink rose bud tea in cafés but never bought any to steep at home. Maybe it was a subconscious move to associate it with the pleasant dim cafés of Beijing's university district - the clatter of Mandarin-English exchanges, the walls of books and French New Wave posters - rather than my bleak florescent-lit apartment. Or maybe it was just pure laziness.

Earlier this week Jacob and I went to Maliandau, also known as Beijing's "Tea Street." This is where restaurants and shops come to source their tea wholesale, and where tea obsessives buy their leaves and gadgets in bulk. We went around and bought a bunch of gifts for his family and, of course, ourselves. I couldn't resist the rose tea, sitting in a big bin and whispering my name. Now that I have it at home, I can't stop thinking of desserts I can make with it.

Matcha Tea and Honey Cakes

dianakuan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:55:29 +0000

The very first thing I have in the morning, almost every day, is a cup of green tea with a spoonful of honey. Sometimes I add a bit of soy milk, other times I don't. But it's that combo of caffeine and tiny bit of sweetness that wakes me up, now that I've weened myself off coffee. (Although I still indulge recreationally, a cappucino here and there at a wifi café.)

So it seemed quite natural to bake something with a green tea and honey flavor combo. I had already made green tea cookies a few weeks ago, to much success, and still had a lot of matcha powder left. I was also inspired by La Tartine Gourmand's Chocolate and Matcha Cake, and which I'll probably make once I stock up on some good quality chocolate and cocoa powder.

But for now I'll be satisfied with my morning tea in cake* form.

*I guess these could be called muffins too, but I tend to associate muffins with big crumbly breakfast items to be downed with coffee, usually Dunkin' Donuts, that fall apart all over your clothes because you're scarfing them down with your hands. These are a bit denser, smaller, clothing-friendlier, and meant to be savored any time of the day, with or without tea.

Rambutan

dianakuan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:46:30 +0000

When I was about 4 or 5, growing up in Guangzhou, I went crazy with excitement whenever my parents brought home a sack of lychees or rambutans from the fruit market. Abandoning whatever toys I was playing with at a time, I would instead grab a plastic bowl and sit for at least an hour or two, carefully carefully removing the skin and pits, not eating any of the flesh until the bowl was filled.

For a kid, this was an excercise in restraint. But I loved the smooth, sweet, and jelly-like texture of both fruits so much that I wanted to eat it all at once, without work getting in the way. And the extra wait made eating doubly enjoyable.

The name rambutan comes from the Malay word for "hairy", a fitting name for a fruit with a bright red prickly rind protecting pearly white or yellowish flesh. With yellow soft spikes that strike me as kind of punkish, rambutans seem to stand out in the market. Can I really eat these, you wonder. Will they prick me like cacti?

Like lychees and longan, rambutans only grow in Southeast Asia, news that came as disappointing when my family moved to Boston. We found lychees pretty easily in Boston's Chinatown. But rambutans, those were harder, and more expensive when available. So I resigned myself to eating it maybe once every year or two. And forgot about how rewarding it was to peel and pit for an afternoon, to have a bowl of sweet rambutans to enjoy at the end.

Green Tea Cookies

dianakuan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:29:10 +0000

The electricity in my apartment went out last night, and I was worried that everything in the fridge would spoil. Great, I thought. There goes all the meat, the dairy, and even the green tea cookie dough I had just prepared when the lights went out.

When I checked this morning, sure enough all the leftovers in the fridge compartment had to be tossed out. But miraculously, everything in the freezer was well preserved, including the ice cubes which didn't seem to have melted at all. And the green tea cookie dough, with a little thawing, was ready to go into the oven.

I based this recipe off Apartment Therapy's Earl Grey Tea Cookies. I forgoed the bigger bits of tea leaves. The great thing about these cookies is that you can shape them easily. I chilled my dough as a square block instead of a roll, and added some criss-cross designs on half the batch. You can also roll out the dough after chilling and use cookie cutters.

Homemade Almond Milk with Bananas and Honey

dianakuan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:02:02 +0000

I have been obsessed with almond milk ever since I discovered Lulu in Beijing. Sold at every market here for 7 yuan a liter, this boxed almond milk has been my new alternative to chamomile for a soothing right-before-bed drink. I also have it at breakfast mixed with green tea, or at dinner whenever my fridge has out of soju or vodka or anything to mix a drink with. Lulu is fine cold, but so delicious when warm that I can unconciously go through a whole box in one sitting.

So naturally I had to make my own. Store-bought Lulu may be addictive, but the homemade version is so transcendent that it makes me forget the 3 or 4 times I had to strain every batch because the mesh in my colander isn't fine enough. But c'est la vie. If you have a very fine-mesh colander to strain out the minute particles of puréed almond, making this will be a breeze.

The results of this first homemade trial were either sipped straight, or heated to go with warm honey and bananas (recipe below). Some other ways to use homemade almond milk: