Homemade Raspberry Powder

Look at this lusciousness!  This beautiful vivid red.  And the fragrance is unbelievably intense, tart and sweet and fruity.  What is this, you ask?  Why it's Homemade Raspberry Powder, used to add flavor and color to all kinds of pastries and other baked goods.  

You can buy this premade at bakery supply stores but it's so easy to make a home and so much more fragrant when just made.  Why not try making this super easy to make Homemade Raspberry Powder at home?

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!

Homemade White Bean Paste 白豆沙餡

Up until recently I had never heard of white bean paste 白豆沙.  Red bean paste 紅豆沙, yes, and how I love the flavor of it.  But never white bean paste.  It turns out that white bean paste is really quite lovely, with the same fine creamy texture of red bean paste but having a milder sweet creamy flavor that's perfect for stuffing a Chinese pastry.

In Japan white bean paste is used for many desserts and is known as 'Shiro-an.'

We needed white bean paste to make chocolate paste filling for our raspberry chocolate tang yuan 覆盆子巧克力湯圓.  So yummilicious!   And even more exciting is that we realized that white bean paste, with its mild sweet flavor and light color, can be used as a base for all kinds of innovative fillings in Chinese pastries.  

In other words: White bean paste + added flavor = exciting new flavor !

Chocolate Filled Raspberry Flavored Tang Yuan 覆盆子巧克力湯圓

This little sweet bite was inspired by Valentine's Day.  It's now past that heart shaped day, I know, but there it is, the inspiration for this sweet treat was that of love and delectable devotion and the divine chocolate bonbons that go with all that.

The idea first began from a desire to have a chocolate filled tang yuan rice dumpling.  OMG, can you imagine, sooo good!  And then with that idea came the desire to surround the yummy oozing chocolate filling with something more fancy, more in tune with the rich decadence of cocoa than just plain ol’ tang yuan dough.  

After much thought I decided that the luscious rosy tartness of raspberry was up to the challenge.  I infused pure raspberry flavor into the tender chewy rice dough that surrounds the tang yuan filling.  Wowzer! 

Raspberry and chocolate, double wowzer!  Our Chocolate Filled Raspberry Flavored Tang Yuan 覆盆子巧克力湯圓 is not your ordinary tang yuan; it's a fancy 'bonbon' kinda tang yuan with an oozing rich chocolate heart wrapped tenderly in a fragrant raspberry pink infused dough.  It's out of this world fancy and delicious!

Vegetable & Mushroom Dumpling 蔬菜蘑菇餃

Hope that all our dear readers have had a most auspicious Chinese New Year!  We've been pretty quiet, just resting after the fierce study schedule we've been on to support my little girl's long and hard preparation for mid year exams.  It's crazy that the schools in HK have so many exams!  😵‍💫

So better late than never, here's our vegetarian offering for the Chinese New Year: a simple but really yummy vegetable dumpling!  It's a tradition to eat vegetarian on the first day of the new year to cleanse the body and spirit as well as to cleanse out the energy of the old year.

We like vegetable dumplings but have found that it's hard to find a really good one.  Recently, however, we tried a mushroom and vegetable dumpling at one of our local dumpling shops that was simple and yet so memorable and tasty.  I kept wanting to go back for more.  This is our version of that same yummilicious Vegetable and Mushroom Dumpling 蔬菜蘑菇餃.

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!

Chestnut Birthday Cake 栗子蛋糕

This is the Chinese cake du jour for birthdays!  At least it sure seems to be as almost every Chinese person I've asked has preferred this cake over all others as their birthday cake.  And it's a delight really, this cake, whipped cream frosting layered with the creamy, light, nutty, and irrepressibly delightful flavors of chestnut.  

My hubby has loved this cake since his childhood when a chestnut cake was the only slice of cake he got the whole year.  Poor thing.  Not nearly enough cake.  So every year, for his birthday, I make him a chestnut cake.  😋

Our cake has chestnut in the cake (a revelation!), white chocolate marscarpone frosting and freshly homemade chestnut purée piped on top in a golden, gorgeous, chestnut-y pile.  Lightly sweet, creamy, and packed with delicate nutty flavor, it's chestnuts all the way, baby!

Gingerbread Birdhouse

Merry Christmas, dear readers!  We present to you our own gingerbread birdhouse, completed just in time for Christmas day.  The design was inspired by a wee birdie, a lovely little lovebird, who recently adopted us.  In a very short time he has totally charmed all of us with his lively personality and cheeky attitude.   Yeah, he's the boss, pretty much.

The other point of our inspiration was, quite naturally, the cuckoo clock!

Five Spice Spritz Cookies

Christmas is just around the corner, so fast, amirite?!  And we're buzzing around, making secret gift plans, decorating the house and, of course, making our Christmas cookies.  

This year we made cookie press cookies, also known as spritz cookies.  A couple years ago I tried making these cookie press cookies for the 1st time and it was a big ol mess: cookie dough not sticking, not pressing out right, just about everything going wrong... 🥹  So I gave up.

I thought to try it again.  But this time we added our own twist to these Christmas Spritz Cookies, a touch of five spice powder to add an exotic flavor to these yummilicious crisp buttery cookies.  We also worked out how to successfully get those darn cookies out and onto the cookie sheet!

Homemade Sui Mai Wrapper 自製燒賣皮

As a fitting start to our Dim Sum exploration I thought to start with the quintessential Siu Mai dim sum 燒賣點心, one of the most favorite and famous of all the dim sums.  However I quickly ran into a problem- it was hard to find and purchase the distinctive yellow sui mai wrapper that form such an integral part of the iconic look of the Siu Mai dim sum dumpling.

So I decided to make my own.  It’s pretty straight forward to make but does require some time, mostly for the cutting up of the individual wrappers.  But man, oh man, was I able to make really nicely thin wrappers which is a must for the really good little dim sum dumpling - no one wants a mouthful of wrapper rather than a mouthful of yummilicious savory filling!