冬至快乐！happy winter solstice ! 🙏🏻☺️

It’s a tradition for us to celebrate winter solstice with tang yuan/glutinous rice ball.

So this is my first time making character tang yuan/glutinous rice balls for my kids. 😅quite tiring… to make these 40 tang yuan but SO HAPPY to see their happy faces when they have it for after school snacks. Asking me if I made it and how did I make it. Even requested for rabbit shape next time 😵‍💫 my tangyuan also changed quite a bit after cooking , not perfect for sure but not bad that kids can figure out it’s Totoro, piggy, penguin and kitty ! 😛

Adapted Recipe from @xueren_mantou recent YouTube video.

I did 3 times the recipe to get about 618g of dough. 😅 for reference one rice ball should be around 10g to 15g of dough with 5g to 10g of fillings.

I’m using ready made black sesame paste/spread from a Japanese brand 千金丹 SenKinTan with no sugar added but ingredients has maltose so the sweetness is just right for me. But i didn’t freeze it first to form balls of fillings so spreading it on the glutinous rice dough and wrapping was quite a disaster 🤪 I ended up with only 40 rice balls as quite a lot burst when I tried to wrap. And also had to reduce the sesame paste amount so that I could wrap it properly 🙈 even get helper to help with the piggy and kitty in the end coz I was 2 hours past my lunch time 😅

Ingredients:

10g rice flour

50ml water

100g glutinous rice flour

50-60ml hot water

10ml coconut oil

Fillings: ready made SenKinTan sesame spread (no sugar)

Soup: palm sugar and Pandan soup (I added ginger powder in my soup as kids doesn’t like the taste of ginger)

Steps:

1. Place glutinous rice flour in a mixing bowl and set aside
2. Mix rice flour with water and cook till thickened up like tangzhong paste. Immediately pour and mix into glutinous rice flour
3. Add hot water and reserve about 2 tbsp to check if required to add on. As different brand of flour has different absorbency.
4. Once dough is formed, it should be smooth and comes clean from bowl
5. Knead on pastry mat and add coconut oil. Knead till pliable , smooth but not sticky
6. Divide the dough for mixing with colorings. Wrap with cling wrap when not in use. (For Totoro, I mix charcoal powder to form grey dough and black dough. And keep some white dough for eyes and tummy.)
7. Once filled and shaped. Cook rice balls in boiling water with medium heat till float and continue to cook another 2mins. Transfer rice ball to room temperature water, drain before serving with soup of your choice. We serve it on palm sugar and Pandan soup. For mine, I like to add some instant ginger powder sachet.