bLIMEy...

Although I was fully aware that milk curdles when an acid is introduced, I still thought that it was a good idea to mix 250 ml of milk with 100 ml of freshly squeezed lime juice and its zest. I told myself that I was going to make lime pie filling. No, not key lime pie filling, because I don't have key limes, but just lime pie filling... the delicious, gooey, jammy-pudding filling.

Since I've never made lime pie filling/lime curd before, I thought it'd be an absolutely greatly stupid idea to use artificial sweetener instead of sugar for the lime pie filling. My mum bought a huge pack of artificial sweetener because she thought that it was sucrose :( So now I'm stuck with a lot of artificial sweetener and I'm not sure I want to use it, since it is obviously less superior than sucrose. :(

So, I don't really want to explain how I messed up making lime pie filling, but I basically mixed fresh lime juice (2 limes) with zest, milk and an egg. Then, while the milk was curdling, I added in artificial sweetener. After baking at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, and seeing that everything was still liquidy (and smelled nice), I figured I should just freeze the thin liquid product and make crushed ice.

It then smelled weird and tasted terrible. Oh gosh. b-LIME-y. It was. Atrocious. The texture was gritty, thanks to the milk. There was a millisecond of sweetness and limey-ness. And then, for the next 4 minutes, there was a putrid artificial aftertaste.

Bleh.

So. I mixed liquid with brown sugar, added stuff, and ended up with lime muffin-gluteny-somethings. They're not cookies or cakes or muffins... the texture is slightly rubbery and gluteny. They're not crumbly but there is a neat whole-wheatish-lime flavour and they're really moist... It actually is like a steamed cake! So if anyone wants to try these weird muffin things...

Ingredients

250 g whole wheat flour

250 ml milk

100 g brown sugar

24 packets of artificial sweetener (ew.) OR 200 g caster sugar

Juice of two limes

Zest of two limes

1 egg

1 cup shredded zucchini

2 tsp baking powder

Method

1. Mix all ingredients.

2. Bake at 190 degrees C/380 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Ma Lai Gao (马来糕) (Malay Cake)

My mum used to/still does buy these cute round little yellow (not natural cake-type yellow. I mean Spongebob-style yellow) cakes from the freezer section of Kamman, the Asian food store. They're called ma[3] lai[2] gao[1] (马来糕). It literally means "Malaysian cake", and for a cake so small, I wonder how it's so succulent (yes, out of all words, I believe that "succulent" is the most accurate adjective). All you have to do is stick them in a microwave for a few seconds, and they end up so spongy and chewy and pillowy.

When browsing through food blogs, I found a recipe for ma lai gao, and I tried it out today. Since I didn't have white flour with me, I used 100% whole wheat flour (whoo!). Evidently, it didn't end up looking Spongebob-yellow. It didn't taste much like the store-bought one either. It was much more buttery and had irregular air bubbles. The store-bought version had perfectly uniform batter, and has a really distinct taste that I couldn't replicate in this version.

This version is still amazing though, but I really wish that I could copy the store-bought version instead, even though I think it used shortening and other random stuff (I'll check next time). The whole point of making the ma lai gao from scratch was so that we'd never have to buy plastic-covered, made-six-months-ago ma lai gao from Kamman anymore!

Unfortunately, since I'm now back in Philadelphia, I won't have access to a steamer, brown sugar, or my tasters (my brother and sister, since they're the ones who eat the ma lai gao), so I guess I'll have to wait until August.

However, this is the quest I've been waiting for! I'm gonna replicate the store-bought ma lai gao!

Dumplings!

Today AK came over to my house and we made vegetable dumplings! I had made the filling earlier on [9am, to be exact], using my brother's drink blender. Actually, it's also a solid-ingredient blender, and it chops carrots and tofu really well! The filling included carrot, extra firm tofu, garlic chives, bean sprouts, and some soy sauce... and PLENTY OF PEPPER. Perhaps there was way too much pepper...

We used premade dumpling wrappers, because it is seriously time consuming making my own dumpling wrappers. My mum used to do that when I was ... 5, and we didn't have any Chinese supermarkets nearby in Australia. She used to flatten out tons of little dubloons of flour, and I used to use the rolling pin and make irregular ovals. The wrappers were much thicker then, and tasted much better than these ones [more gluten, I think, and more transparent and chewy]...

The lettuce leaves are there to prevent the dumplings from sticking. However, at least two dumplings DID stick to the pan. :(

YEAH DUMPLINGS! This was also a great time to catch up on life and college, and to get fat for the winter. Haha.

Man Tou

There are two things that my mum has been attempting to make during her free time since we moved here, a few years ago. One of them is fa[2] gao[1], which is a steamed rice cake. It has failed miserably.

The second is man[2] tou[2], which has gone from rock-hard lumps of gluteny-water to actual scallion filled steamed buns of yeasty awesomeness. I am proud of my mum, and the fact that she somehow figured out how to make awesome steamed buns without a recipe.

She used to mix flour and water and baking soda, in an attempt to make something that resembled man tou. It was icky.

Now, she somehow manages to gauge enough flour and water and yeast... without measuring them or anything [!] and somehow yields a perfect-ish batch of the ubiquitous bun on the street anywhere in metropolis China.

This sure beats the airy sweet bleached stuff [okay, even though the flour my mum uses IS bleached flour, it doesn't taste like Wonder-Bread-bleach-crap] that look exactly like oblong sponges "man tou" that one can obtain from Kamman. Gotta respect her.