Chye tau kueh (fried savoury radish cake)

Recently, some friends gobbled down two plates of chye tau kueh from the hawker centre in front of me whilst I munched on my gluten-free carob muffin. They felt a bit guilty comparing their fried dish with my healthy snack but actually I really wished I could eat chye tau kueh too!
I came home and [...]

Steamed yam cake 芋頭糕

One of the most popular reads on this blog is my posting on steamed Chinese radish cake 蘿蔔糕. The same basic recipe can be adapted for a whole range of other root vegetables — such as pumpkin, sweet potato or yam — and a supporting cast of ingredients. These are traditionally preserved Chinese sausages and [...]

Steamed radish cake 蘿蔔糕

Ever since I started experimenting with different foods in an attempt at food rotation, I’ve been thinking of cooking this dish. It’s made from Chinese white radish, also known as daikon (and most confusingly, can be called ‘carrot’ when translated into English, as I’ve noted here).
What held me up was trying to think of substitutes [...]

Steamed cupcakes: fatt gou/ huat kueh 發糕

I’m back to experimenting with steamed Asian snacks. These ‘exploded’ steamed cupcakes (which probably accounts for their name in Chinese which means ‘risen cake’) are quite common. In Singapore, they are usually referred to by the Hokkien pronunciation, huat kueh, but I’m more at home with the Cantonese name, fatt gou, which is also used [...]

A blessing in disguise… almost

For health reasons, processed meats full of fats, poor quality cuts, various animal parts, artificial flavourings, preservatives and other additives have not touched my plate for a long time. So when the Singapore government banned the import of processed meat products from two China brands, Maling and Narcissus, last August, it didn’t bother me (though [...]

Steamed sponge cake 水蒸蛋糕

Before I started experimenting with Asian snacks, I used to bake tea time snacks several times a week – as you can see from the earlier entries on this blog. So my weekly supermarketing would inevitably include dairy staples of butter and eggs. Recently, I noticed that my stock of eggs and butter has [...]

Water chestnut fritters 炸馬蹄條

This was another one of those almost-disasters, or a cooking adventure if you look on the bright side :). It’s Project No. 3 in my exploration of alternative flours and different ingredients as part of food rotation to deal with food intolerances. The new flour used here is Water Chestnut Flour (click on link to [...]

Brown sugar steamed buns 黑糖饅頭

I felt like something ‘cake-y’ today and decided to try these mantou (manju in Japanese) for the first time. This is taken from a Japanese wagashi recipe book, 日式和菓子.
In the cookbook they looked sort of like muffins, but are steamed instead of baked. Actually I made the mistake of turning on the oven to preheat [...]

Japanese sweet potato balls さつまいも茶巾しぼり

This recipe comes from the same cookbook as the 5-coloured glutinous rice balls in milk soup I made earlier, a book of Japanese autumn & winter wagashi entitled 《和果子．和甘味 (秋冬篇)》 (in Chinese and English).
It’s also part of my attempt to make teatime snacks from a variety of ingredients as part of food rotation to deal [...]

Chewy pumpkin cake 南瓜餅

Project no. 2 in learning how to use alternative flours and different carbohydrates as part of food rotation to deal with food intolerances.
After the unsuccessful shredded yam cake, I tried out this Chewy Pumpkin Cake (Lam Gua Paeng 南瓜餅) which used mainly glutinous rice flour, which I’d already got plenty of practice with making glutinous [...]