Random Tidbits: Part 1 - Two Sweet

There are a bunch of random meals that we haven’t written about yet, so I’ll write about them all in a few parts called Random Tidbits.

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A few weeks ago, most of our extended family gathered at my aunt’s house for a dinner of steamed crabs. What I want to focus on, though, is what we had for dessert. Firstly, we had sesame balls filled with red bean paste. Yup, the same stuff you can find during dim sum. These are like the fried versions of tangyuan.



My mom has always wanted to try making these. I was hoping this would be a home run right off the bat.



For the red bean filling, we soaked the red beans for a bit before boiling it in a pot. Once cooked, they were drained and mashed up with sugar and water. The dough was made from glutinous rice flour, sugar, and both boiling and warm water. The dough was hard to handle because it broke when you tried to stretch and form it around the filling.



We tried to fry up a few small ones to see how they turned out. The filling was too dry and was hardly a paste, but rather a dry mash of sweet red beans. The dough came out hard because the dough wasn’t thick enough.



Adjustments to both the filling and the way the sesame balls were made, then deep fried. In the end, we had a two plates piled high with sesame balls that were so-so. We still couldn’t achieve the thickness to the dough and get the soft cooked sweet glutinous rice flour. The filling wasn’t moist enough either. Next time, we will definitely have to look up a recipe online.



The funny thing was that we made these sesame balls before our steamed crab dinner. No one ruined their appetite for dinner though, cause let's face it, the sesame balls were disappointing.



Once all the mess from dinner was cleaned up, a chocolate cake from T&T was brought out. The cake was for Jimmy’s belated birthday. Lucy said that the cake was a chocolate ganache cake, but the cake was actually chocolate mousse.



The chocolate mousse cake wasn’t overly sweet. In fact, the chocolate cake base was probably sweeter than the mousse itself. At first, the cake felt pretty light. The airy mousse was in a perfect balance with the light chocolate cake base.



The chocolate mousse cake felt like an anvil in my stomach after a few minutes, though. Milk would’ve helped, but we had something better: tea. Hot Oolong tea, that was pretty strong, helped cut the heaviness of the mousse.



At the end of the night, I probably ended up drinking a full pot of tea and ate three slices of cake. No wonder I felt so sluggish afterwards. Oops.