Black Sesame Pastry Filling 黑芝麻餡

A spin on the classic Chinese pastry filling, this Black Sesame Pastry Filling is transformed by the addition of extra layers of rich flavors like butter and condensed milk.  Easy to make, deliciously nutty and sophisticated in taste, wickedly black in color, this Chinese Black Sesame Pastry Filling is a soooo yummy and a perennial crowd favorite!

Winter Melon Pastry Filling 冬瓜餡

 

Onward on another new and exciting food filling for our Five Flavors Mini Crystal Zongzi!  This Winter Melon Pastry Filling 冬瓜餡 is a filling that surprised us quite a bit.  I had never realized that the Winter Melon Candy could be used to make a filling!  Even though candied, the winter melon candy still retains the sponginess of the original melon, thus, when transformed into this filling, it soaks up all the flavors it is cooked with, especially the floral hints from the osmanthus flower syrup.  Sweet and delicate, this unique filling is quite delectable!

Matcha Pastry Filling 抹茶餡

Look at this green!  This is another one of the Five Flavors of Filling that we made for our zongzi 粽子 this year.  The gorgeous green comes from matcha 抹茶, the finely ground powder of green tea, used in Japan traditionally as a part of the tea ceremony.  It is also, most delightfully, used in baked goods and candies, the fact of which we exploit today by making this Matcha Pastry Filling 抹茶餡, a creamy, luscious, gorgeously green pastry filling with a unique grassy, sweet yet slightly bitter umami flavor that is out of this world!

Pineapple Custard Pastry Filling 鳳梨蛋奶餡

Wow-oh-wow, look at this gorgeous yellow!  As one of the flavors used for our Five Flavors Mini Crystal Zongzi 五味迷你水晶粽子, this fruity filling starts with a coconut milk custard base and combines it with cooked down pineapple, creating a creamy Pineapple Custard Pastry Filling 鳳梨蛋奶餡 that is bursting with fresh, gorgeous, sweet and tart tropical flavors!

Coconut Milk Custard Pastry Filling 椰香蛋奶餡

We start with the creamiest and most basic flavor of the five as we begin our tour of the Five Flavors Mini Crystal Zongzi 五味迷你水晶粽子 filling's flavors.  Based on the classic and comforting flavors of custard and coconut, this Coconut Milk Custard Pastry 椰香蛋奶餡 is a milky, eggy creamy delight that is easy to make and suitable not only as filling for zongzi 粽子 but also for all kinds of Chinese pastries and bao!

Dubai Chocolate Mooncake 杜拜朱克力月餅

Yeah, yeah, I know.  It's Dubai Chocolate again.  Obssessed much, lol?!  But, seriously, how could I resist?  After successfully making homemade kadayif noodles, pistachio cream and then the gorgeous Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake, we were pretty much over the moon with how well our efforts came out.  And with our favorite festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節, just around the corner, well, isn't Dubai Chocolate just the perfect match for a mooncake filling?!  

Our Dubai Chocolate Mooncakes 杜拜朱克力月餅 are filled with nutty, crunchy pistachio kadayif cream at the heart of a chocolate flavored bean paste, all encased in delicate traditional patterned mooncake skins.  So pretty and oh so delicious!  My little girl ate all my first batch already, hehe!

Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake

We took the elements of the trendy Dubai Chocolate Bar and transformed them into a most fabulous Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake!  Two special fillings, a layer of crunchy, nutty vibrant pistachio kadayif cream and a layer of airy, rich chocolate mousse are encased inside layers of a moist chocolatey chocolate cake, all of which are lovingly frosted with a chocolate ganache frosting.  OMgoshdarnit...can you tell that we love, love, love our chocolate, lol?!

Coloured Macarons Filled with White Chocolate Ganache

I'm super excited to share this particular post with everyone!  Homemade macarons!  We love macarons so much but then who doesn't, amirite?   These dainty meringue based sandwich cookies have stolen the world's sugar encrusted heart.  So what could be better than to be able to make these at home, right?  We've previously successfully made scrumptious chocolate flavored macarons at THKC however, every time we tried to make other coloured macarons we have failed.  :(

Onwards in time...and this Christmas my little girl and I decided to participate in her school Xmas bazaar and thus needed to bake up a seeming truckload of cookies to sell.  And one of the cookies that my little girl really wanted for the bake sale was macarons coloured  in red and green, all the Christmas colors.  Yiks!  Could I do it?  Not sure but like a good and hopeful mama, I said yes to coloured macarons.

Ahhh...a challenge laid down.  Dear readers, the cookie game was afoot!

Chinese Chocolate Pastry Filling Paste 巧克力餡

It turns out that you can make all kinds of fun new and creative fillings for your Chinese pastries and buns.  I recently discovered what I think is the key to being able to do this: white bean paste.  I had not heard of white bean paste until recently, having only known its famous cousin, red bean paste 紅豆沙.

White bean paste 白豆沙 is a sweet, creamy mildly bean flavored paste of light color.  It is used to fill pastries to delicious effect.  A super added plus is that white bean paste takes on both color and flavors really well, thus allowing for all kinds of new filling flavors to be made.

We start off exploring the versatility of white bean paste by adding chocolate to it.  So exciting, cuz I love, love, love chocolate.  Our Chinese chocolate pastry filling turned out incredible: oh so chocolaty, creamy, and oozy.  A perfect hidden heart of smooth creamy chocolate!

Chestnut Purée 栗子泥

Okay, this is one of those things were I’m like, floored, at how something I made at home can be so damn good.  Previously when I needed chestnut purée for cake, etc., I had bought cans of ‘crème de marrons ’, (french for chestnut purée).  The French are crazy about chestnuts, apparently, and rightly so.  Crème de Marrons is sooooo yummy!!  I just want to eat it up straight out of the can!  

However, this year, just as I was gearing up for my yearly Chestnut Birthday Cake 栗子蛋糕 (for my hubby😘), my grocery store stopped carrying crème de marron.  Of course.  Right when I need it. Thanks, grocery store.  

So my only option was to try to make it at home.  I was pretty nervous, under a lot of cake-y pressure.  Would it turn out anything like the delicious chestnut purée that I needed for my cake?

Turns out that homemade chestnut purée is pretty easy to make and pretty darn close to the commercially packed ones.  Golden, nuttily sweet with a thick smooth texture, homemade chestnut purée is absolutely fabulous!  And it saves me a buck or two, yay!

Purple Sweet Potato Mooncake Filling Paste 紫蕃薯餡

It's almost time for my favorite Chinese festival of the year, the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節. Mooncakes, glowing lanterns, the full moon in the velvet sky, what's there not to like!  We're serious about our mooncakes in this household and every year will prepare one of our homemade mooncakes, choosing between fragrant Lotus Paste Double Yolk Mooncake, nutty Five Nuts Mooncake, delectable Black Sesame Walnut Mooncake, or the icily delicious Snow Skin Custard Mooncake.  

This year we wanted to try something different so we decided to try making mooncakes with both a new filling and skin.  To wrap the mooncake we chose to use the Chinese Flaky Pastry Dough that we wrote about recently.  There's a different way to the roll out the pastry dough that exposes the delicate layers in a flaky spiral swirl.  So beautiful!  

And for the mooncake filling, we experimented with this Chinese Purple Sweet Potato Mooncake Filling Paste 紫蕃薯餡 which, as it turns out, makes an amazing filling: lush and gorgeously purple hued, the sticky soft paste rich and deliciously sweet with a fragrant hint of cloves and nutmeg.  We stuffed our mooncakes with this yammilicious filling along with a hidden heart of soft and tender mochi.  

Note that not only is this filling for mooncakes but also for all other kinds of pastry, for example these Chinese Flaky Pastries.

Mung Bean Paste 綠豆沙餡

This is one of the classic Chinese pastry cake fillings, the Green Mung Bean Paste 綠豆沙餡, a light, creamy, beany and nutty sweet golden filling that is one of my favorite fillings.  We used this paste to make our yummilicious Green Mung Bean Cakes 綠豆糕 for Duanwu Dragon Boat Festival  端午節 this year but actually it is more often used in as a tender filling for various Chinese cakes, pastries, cookies and even mooncakes.

White Chocolate Mascarpone Frosting

Happy holidays!  And in the spirit of the holidays I give you...cake frosting!  And you're probably thinking...what the heck?  Well, it goes like this - we made a white chocolate Christmas cake which naturally had to have white chocolate frosting.  And thus we discovered our most favorite cake frosting ever!  

Recently we've been experimenting with all different kinds of frostings/buttercreams for our cakes.  After all a girl cannot ever have too much cake, amiright?!  Some frostings hubby found too sweet.  Others my little girl found not sweet enough.  And yet some others I found too buttery.  

But at long last we hit the jackpot with this White Chocolate Mascarpone Frosting,  an exquisitely light yet creamily chocolaty, slightly tangy and not overly sweet frosting that pipes like a dream, perfect for frosting and decorating cakes and absolutely yummilicious to boot!

Chocolate Ganache

I don't know about you dear reader, but I love me my chocolate.  And if at all possible I like to have chocolate...with chocolate!  So these little Chocolate Ganache filled Chocolate Macarons are a great favorite of mine (see our recipe for Chocolate Macarons here).  This creamy, soft yet solid ganache filling is super yummiliciously chocolately and a great filling for macarons.  

Try this super duper simple to make Chocolate Ganache that dries to a perfect semi solid state, creamy when you bite into the macaron, but solid enough to keep its lovely round edged shape.