Archive for the ‘chinese new year’ Category

“Mum…” I ventured, not five minutes after packing the last love letter into its jar “next week, can we make the bang bang?” Mum looked at me. Contemplated, for half a second, and then “No. Too messy.” It made sense. The last time we made kuih bankit (fondly known as “the bang bang” at our place), our kitchen was covered in a fine mist of tapioca flour for days. A short pause. “Maybe the peanut ones?” she thought, aloud.

These peanut cookies are a sublime mix of crunchy, sweet and salty. Conveniently bite-sized, you’ll find yourself reaching for just one more… and then another, and another, and before you know it, they’ll be all gone!

Peanut Cookies

makes approx 120

Ingredients

100g butter
100g margarine
200g peanuts (roasted and ground roughly)
25g sesame seeds (roasted)
200g white sugar
200g plain flour
1 egg (separated)
whole peanuts (optional)

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees (fan on).
21. Toss the butter, margarine, peanuts, sesame seeds, sugar, flour and egg yolk in a mixing bowl.

3. Rub the ingredients together. They will begin to form a dough. Knead the dough until it is shiny.

4. Using a teaspoon, scoop some of the mix up and roll it around in your hands to form a ball. Place the ball on a well greased oven tray and squish down using two fingers.
5. Here, you can either make a small indent in the cookie using the back of a chopstick, or stick a half peanut in the centre of each cookie.

6. Brush the cookies with egg white and pop in the oven to cook for approximately 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
7. Let the cookies cool on the tray. When they hit room temperature, loosen the base with a spatula or egg lift.

8. Enjoy! Mmmmm…. peanutty…..

Chinese New Year means different things to different people. For some, the promise of seeing anyone and everyone is enough. For others, its all about the red packets and playing mah-jong. For me, it’s (rather unsurprisingly) about the food.

Every year, Dad & I spend a couple of hours sitting at stove making biscuits. “The Stove?” you ask, “Surely you mean the oven?” But no! These flaky, crispy biscuits are made stove top.

Love letters, or “kuih kapek” are a Chinese New Year favourite. They’re notoriously hard to make and store, but eating them makes it all seem so worthwhile.

Kuih Kapek

makes approximately 70 biscuits (not including the burnt ones…)

Ingredients:

6 eggs
1 cup rice flour
1 cup white sugar
1 tin (** ml) coconut milk

Method:

1. Mix the ingredients in a bowl.

2.

3. Heat moulds over coals (or in this case, a gas stove).

4. When the moulds are hot, quickly ladle the batter onto one side of the mould and swirl quickly to distribute. Clamp the two halves of the mould back together and return to the gas burner. The batter will bubble over a little bit.

5. When the edges that have bubbled over are cooked, scrape them off and flip the mould. Let the moulds sit over the gas for another 30 seconds.

6. Open the moulds and check if the colour is right.

7. If the colour is good, slide the biscuits out, fold quickly into quarters (here is where asbestos hands come in handy!) and put aside to cool.