The Malaysiafiles: Part 3- Kuih and Sweets

One of my favourite, favourite foods of all time: nyonya kuih.

Nyonya refers to the fusion of Chinese and Malay-style cooking in particular, but can also include fusions from other areas in South East Asia. 'Kuih' is Malay for 'cake', although rather than the spongy cakes we're used to, they're often made from glutinous rice flour and are dense and custard-y.

This is kuih talam, my favourite of all the kuihs: it's got a sweet green pandan custard layer, and a white coconut layer that's slightly salty as well as sweet on top: the flavours balance each other out perfectly.

Some other kuis include kuih lapis ('layer cake'), which is made of many colourful layers,  and kuih dadar, a pandan-flavoured crêpe rolled up with gula melaka (palm sugar)-sweetened coconut inside. I've actually made my own versions of kuih dadar and kuih lapis on my blog Tashcakes!, although I'm working on a more improved recipe for kuih lapis.

(The centre sweet it a glutinous rice ball with sweet peanut filling)

The test of a good kuih lapis is if you can peel the layers apart from each other- I need to work on that when I improve my recipe!

As you can see on the plate above, there were also more Chinese-y style glutinous rice sweets, such as the peanut-filled ball in the middle. There were also banana-flavoured ones with red bean, green pandan or pink food colouring in the middle, and one very strange one...

The strange one I'm referring to is the dark grey sticky rice cake at the bottom left of the last pic up there. It's dyed that colour by the herb that's used to flavour it. It had a bland, herbal taste to it, and wasn't helped by the fact that the herb is affectionately nicknamed 'chicken poo leaf'. Still, an interesting thing to try, and of course there were plenty of other personal favourites to eat such as pisang goreng (fried bananas: banana fritters):

There were also purple sweet potato fritters, look at how pretty!

Something else I had never tried before was honeycomb cake, so-called because of the air bubbles that become trapped in the cake batter during baking. It was delicious and caramel-y, and really soft and light.

One more unusual but awesome thing I tried seemed like a standard Western-style pastry at first, but it turned out to have a twist:

Cinnamon swirl danish pastry, right? Well, not quite. It is sweet like a danish pastry, but instead of danish pastry, it's a deep fried doughnut-type affair; and instead of cinnamon, it's five spice. Surprising if you're not expecting it, but it worked very well.

Finally, we also ate durian pancakes: thin, delicate crêpes filled with sweetened fresh cream and fresh durian. True to durian form, you could smell these things from tables away (a signature pungent smell of custard, caramel and rotting onions), and also true to form, they were absolutely delicious.

Next time, during Part 4 of the Malaysiafiles, I'll be continuing with sweet food to explore delicious shaved ice desserts and drinks.

The Malaysiafiles: Part 1- Unique Eats from Sabah

2012 brought you the Australiafiles: this year I bring you the Malaysiafiles!

I visited my jiapo, aunt and uncle in Kota Kinabalu this month (I got back three days ago and I'm STILL jet lagged as hell). From the UK came myself, mum, aunt, uncle and two cousins. From Texas came another aunt, and from Australia came another aunt and uncle (the parents of my cousin who got married during my trip to Oz). It was more of a mini reunion this time round, but I assure you no less food was eaten.

For the first half of the trip, mum and I stayed round my jiapo, aunt and uncle's house in KK, and for the second we stayed in a hotel. Not only is my jiapo an amazing cook, but my aunt and uncle made sure we ate lots of local delights too. In fact, the very first thing my uncle Herbert plonked down on a table as soon as mum and I arrived was something I've never seen (or smelled!) before in my life.

(Mum on the left, aunt on the right)

This fruit is called a 'tarap', and is native to Borneo. It's related to the breadfruit and jackfruit, and has a distinct, pungently sweet smell. The strong smell can be off-putting for some, but honestly, compared to the slightly rotten smell of a durian fruit, it's like a lightly fragranced bouquet of flowers. I didn't even think the tarap had a particularly bad smell- it sort of reminded me of the way a really ripe banana smells, only stronger.

The outside feels like a stiff wire scrubbing brush, but on the inside are lots of soft, plump kernels of fruit, each with its own large seed inside.

To open it, you just have to grab it and tear it open with your hands- no knife necessary.

It tasted amazing, I'm sad that I won't be able to find it anywhere else- it was sort of like a tropical fruit salad, a cross between bananas, lychees, pineapples and vanilla ice-cream. In fact, if I had free access to these fruits, I'd love to try making tarap ice-cream! I think it'd work really well.

Next on the Unique Eats menu are Sandakan cow pat tarts (also known as UFO tarts). These were originally made in Sandakan and are only really found there, although they are starting to catch on in nearby areas within Sabah.

This one's a UFO shape, with a circular ring of piped meringue and a piped cross in the centre. You can just about see the rich custard filling in the centre, and the base is a light sponge cake.

This one was a 'cow pat' shape, with a swirl of meringue piped all the way around and up from the custard.

I've actually made this before on my blog Tashcakes! In fact, this weekend I had another go at fashioning a recipe for cow pat tarts in an attempt to make them more authentic. I came really close this time- next time they'll be perfect! Head on over there for the recipes I have so far. At least these are easier to create than trying to grow a tarap tree in London!

Last of all on the Unique Eats menu are pineapple jam pastries: flaky, light pastry filled with a rich pineapple jam (a similar pineapple jam you'll find on Chinese-style pineapple tarts). These I've not made before, but I can't wait to get experimenting in the kitchen.

The pastries are at the front of the photo. Behind are two coconut tarts (enriched with egg yolks to make them extra moist and delicious), and behind you can see an intact cow pat tart. =D

As you might have gathered, this will be a series of parts like the Australiafiles. Tomorrow, I'll be posting about the worst food of any trip ever: aeroplane food.

The Australiafiles: Part 1- How a Chinese Family Eats

Family food time. <3

For the past two weeks I was in Sydney, Australia, having made the long journey from here in the UK for a cousin's wedding. I took the opportunity to document some cool food experiences, from aeroplane food to fancy restaurants. I think I'll start with the latter!

Quick background: My mum's side of the family is Chinese, and scattered over Malaysia (where her generation was born and raised), the UK, the US and Australia. The only place I haven't been to is the US, and all others I've either lived in or visited a number of times to see family (luckily this time around my relatives in the US made it to Oz for the wedding so I got to see them too). A high percentage of Australia's population is Chinese or otherwise East Asian, so that will probably reflect in the food I post about here.

Now, onto Chinese eats, and with a very traditional type of food: dim sum.

See that round thingy in the middle? It's called a Lazy Susan: the multiple dishes are placed on it and the diners at the table can spin it around to try a bit of everything on offer (which is quite a traditional Chinese way to eat, rather than Western-style where stuff is plated up for you). In the case of dim sum you order what you want off of trolleys of food that are pushed around, and it's added to a tab thingy that's added up at the end of your meal. You often also get a pot or two of green tea.

The gold sparkly thing in the middle was because we were celebrating my jia po's 80th birthday.

You can get all sorts in dim sum: jiaozi dumplings, baozi dumplings, egg tarts, choi sum, beef balls, noodles... and, of course, chicken feet.

One of two things I find too fiddly to eat: the second being cherries without a pitter.

I'm not grossed out by chicken feet (more poetically called 'phoenix claws' in Chinese), but I find them so damned difficult to eat. You're supposed to just pop them in your mouth and (look away if squeamish) suck the skin and sinew off the bones, spitting the bones out, but this is a way of eating I just haven't inherited from that side of my family. (Noodle slurping I can do, though.)

A beef ball: tender and flavoured subtly with things like ginger, garlic and spring onions

Mum and I, with me showing off my mad chopsticks skills.

Afterword: We went to a really nice restaurant for dim sum on this occasion, but dim sum isn't usually a formal thing. I've also noticed that a lot of Chinatown restaurants in London only do dim sum at lunchtime to 5pm (and it was indeed lunchtime when we went to this place)- so I guess it's more of a lunch/ brunch thing.