dessert Tag

PEANUT BUTTER STICKY RICE BALLS IN GREEN TEA

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THEY COMPLETE ME

Sorry but I have to run off quickly today, and leave you with this traditional and wildly beloved Chinese dessert.  These little pretty purses called tang-yuan, meaning “soup-circles”, are very popular, if not mandatory, at all major celebratory event and holidays because of their literal implication for roundedness and completeness. The elegance of its name may be lost in translation but I assure you that the reasons for their popularity are not, if you would just invest 1 hour of your life to find out.

The recipe for sticky rice ball-dough is an update from an older recipe, which I thought had a couple unnecessary steps and confusions.  Then instead of making a peanut-filling from scratch, which would probably never be as smooth with my incompetent food-processor, I decided to use a mix of store-bought smooth peanut butter with a little coconut oil (to loosen the texture further) and brown sugar.  The sticky rice wrapper is slippery and chewy, like little delicious purses bursting with lava-like peanut butter filling that comes with a hint of coconuts.  It’s a mouthful of complimenting textures and flavours, chewy and runny, sweet and slightly salty, intensely nutty and rich but balanced with the subtle bitterness and fragrance from lightly honey-sweetened green tea.

More than just words, they’ll complete you.

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TIRAMISU CHURRO + WARM COFFEE CUSTARD

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The problem with me as a recipe dreamer hallucinater during the still-ongoing Thanksgiving carnival is that every year, in utter rudeness, I always feel like leaving the table even before the turkey makes it out of the oven.  Evidently from my premature and inappropriate blabbering of the X’mas blend coffee bars in last November while the whole town was still chattering about tweaking pumpkin pies to death, to now this uncooperative side-tracking dessert that doesn’t even rhyme with “ies” and ” akes”, it is obviously true.  I have no table-side manners.  Now before I leave, pass me the damn stuffings.

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peach mascarpone pot pie + ginger molasses cookie lid

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Had I anticipated enough courage to pick up the topic of peach and mascarpone again this summer, I probably wouldn’t have cashed that sob-story so early.  After that horrendous disaster of a pie, if that pile of slumpy menace could still be called that…, I was determined to quit peach forever, total rehab.  After all, they quit me first.  You see, that’s the other side of the story.  Years ago, peaches decided to join the alliance of fruits that were waging an allergy campaign against me by inducing itchy mouth every time I tried to reach out a friendly lick.  As I was addicted to rejection, every summer since was a struggling anniversary of our separation.  Even after more than a decade… that day when I picked them out of the mascarpone-puddle-of-death and ate them, the peaches still made damn well sure that I was reminded.  I saved them from the fate of the eternal dumpster and they repaid me with crawly esophagus… lil fuckers.

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accidental strawberry pot pies

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I’m mega-watt sick guys.  Really.  STAY AWAY on the other side of the computer and try not to touch the screen I am highly contagious!  This is like the 100+ times I’ve gotten sick since I moved to Beijing because my unevolved Canadianess is no match for China’s uber-advanced virus.  My further disrespect for it led me to go out for a night of harmless chatters over my favorite Sichuan face-torching/throat-choking dishes, which left me MUTED after I came home.  MUUUTED, people.  Paralyzed and powerless even when I saw a lift of a leg at the sofa across the apartment (!!!!…!!!!….!..).  ZIP!  I am Ariel without a fairy tale… well plus… a couple other things but you get my point.

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Forgive Me I Have Pie-d…

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The only equivalent comparison in life to this would be:  In our last two years in New York when we were practically cast out of Manhattan by elitism (FINE, high rents) and moved to… Jersey City where there was a most pathetic looking, hicks-Ahoy karaoke bar right around the block.  With more conviction than I withheld on my wedding day I said to Jason, “IF we EVER raised even the SLIGHTEST idea of walking into this place, it is THE moment that we’ve been “Jersified” and must pack up and move back in the city immediately!”  We survived Jersey and never did walk into that karaoke bar.  But instead THIS happened here.  My cue that says I have been in YET another dump for far too long that – I – made – a – PIE!!!

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