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!

Homemade Lotus Seed Paste 白蓮蓉

This lovely round of goldenness is my homemade Lotus Seed Paste,  白蓮蓉 , a soft, luscious, slightly nutty sweet paste made from lotus seeds that is used in many Chinese pastries and cake, including the famous Lotus Paste Double Yolk Mooncake 雙黃白蓮蓉月餅.  During our making of Lotus Seed Egg Tea  蓮子蛋茶 recently we discovered the secret of cooking lotus seeds that allows them to become meltingly soft.  

I realized then that this technique might make a huge impact on the lotus seed paste (that we previously wrote about when making Double Lotus Mooncake) that we make at home for our various mooncakes and Chinese pastries.  I tried it and I was right!  It totally made a huge difference, the softer lotus seeds pureed and cooked down into a lusciously soft creamy and melty paste, just like the ones in the shops!

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.

Homemade Shrimp Ball Paste Steamed with Broccoli 手打蝦膠蒸西蘭花

Yumm...broccoli and shrimp...two of my favorite things in one easy dish!  Make this way easier than you think Homemade Shrimp Ball Paste Steamed with Broccoli for dinner and not only does it look good but it's a two for one (seafood and veggies) as well as super yummilicious.  

The key to this spectacular looking dish is the shrimp paste, or shrimp ball paste as I have called it to differentiate it from the intensely aromatic fermented shrimp paste 蝦醬.  This shrimp ball paste is made with fresh shrimps and it's surprisingly easy to make.  

Once you have the hang of making shrimp ball paste you can make plain ol' shrimp balls for your noodle dishes or hotpots, or smear it on all kinds of veggies to be steamed or fried to shrimpy deliciousness!

Fragrant Pan Fried Squid Paste 香煎魷魚滑

Ah, the mysterious creature of the deep, the delicious squiggly squid!  The stuff of legends, sailors of old telling tales of ginormous squid rising wrathfully from the seas to shallow them whole, boats and all.  

Did you know that the giant squid is a real creature, growing up to the size of 30-60 feet (13-20 meters)!!  It's true, they really exist and I'll bet they're super yummy too, if ever I get a chance to snack on a bit o' giant tentacle.  

For now , though, I'll have to be content with the wonderfully fresh squid that we can find at the wet markets in Hong Kong and especially, especially with our latest yummilicious discovery, the amazingly scrumptious freshly made squid paste that one can find at selected wet market stalls.  

It's really fabulous that they did all the hard work of making the squid paste already (so fresh too!) and you can just pick some up and TA-DA!!, just like that, a drool worthy, super easy to make and yummilicious dish, the Pan Fried Squid Paste 香煎魷魚滑!

Grandma's Red Bean Paste 紅豆沙

Red Bean Paste 紅豆沙 is a real favorite Chinese sweet pastry and dumpling filling.  I love this stuff!  And my grandma's homemade red bean paste was soooo lusciously good!  (Chinese chocolate!) And it sure got me hooked on this stuff for the rest of my life.  

I sometimes will get urges (out of nowhere) to go out and find something with red bean paste in it so that I can stuff my face.  Nom, nom, nom!  But sometimes I get a bit sad and nostalgic here in Hong Kong cuz, to be honest, it's hard to find good red bean paste pastries and dumplings here.  I think the reason for that is that red bean paste is not a favorite in this southern region, lotus paste and black sesame paste being more preferred.  

(See our posts on Black Sesame Walnut Mooncakes Recipe 黑芝麻核桃月餅 and Homemade Lotus Seed Paste 白蓮蓉 for our yummy recipes for black sesame paste and lotus seed paste.)  

However, we solved that problem by making Grandma's red bean paste ourselves now.  It's not hard, just takes a bit of time and then you can enjoy the deliciousness of homemade red bean paste for filling all your buns, pastries, dumplings, or just for sneaking secret unctuous midnight spoonfuls. (OMG, my first Nigella reference!)