Marbled Tortoise Cakes (紅龜粿)
Equipment
- Red Tortoise cake mold
- Steamer
Ingredients
- 100 g wheat starch
- 70 g water
- A pinch salt
- 250 g coconut milk
- 250 g glutinuous rice flour
- 30 g sugar
- 30 ml oil
- 50 ml water
Colors from root
- 25 g beet root for red colour (steamed for 20 minutes and meshed)
- 25 g purple color sweet potatoes for purple colour (steamed for 20 minutes and meshed)
- 50 g white flesh Japanese sweet potatoes for while color (steamed for 20 minutes and meshed)
- 1 tsp pandan essence
Mung Bean Filings
- 250 g split mung bean soaked overnight and drained
- 180 g sugar
- 3 pandan leaves tied to a knot
- 1/4 cup water
- 110 ml oil
- Some banana leaves
Instructions
Mung bean filings
- Steam the soaked and drained mung bean for 20 minutes with the pandan leaves.
- Discard the pandan leaves, and add sugar, salt and oil and water to the beans.
- Blend until smooth or to a consistency you like.
- Cook this mixture over medium heat, until a dough is formed.
- Set aside.
Dough
- Mix the wheat starch and water thoroughly in a bowl.
- Boil the coconut milk on low heat.
- Add the wheat starch mixture to the coconut milk. Keep stirring until you get a dough.
- Transfer the dough onto a mixer.
- Add in the sugar, glutinuous flour, water and oil and mix into a dough.
- Divide the dought into 4 portions, about 215g to 220g each.
- Add a portion of to the pandan essence and half the white sweet potatoes.
- Add a portion of to the half the white sweet potatoes.
- Add a portion of to the purple sweet potatoes.
- Add a portion of to the beet root.
Assembly
- Determine how much dough you'll need for each tortoise cake by filling up the mold with the white dough. Weigh that. Divide that into 2 and that's the weight of the dough and the mung bean paste for each cake.
- My mold takes 20g of mung bean paste and 20g of dough each.
- Divide out the dough and mung bean paste into 20g each.
- Wrap each the mung bean ball into the dough.
- To marble, use 15g of white and 5g of colored dough.
- Dust the cake in glutinuous rice flour and press them firmly into the mold.
- Release the cake by tapping.
- Place each cake onto a banana leaf cut to the size of the cake.
- Steam at 80C for 6 minutes.
- Remove from the steamer promptly and brush each cake with cooking oil.
witWe grew up with these Chinese sweet potatoes tortoise cakes. In the market where my mom used to sell poultry, the stall that sells these chinese cakes will have them freshly made each morning and we would buy some so often.
We call them ang ku kueh, which simply means red tortoise cakes in Hokkien. The wooden mold is always shaped like a tortoise, and they are almost always red. If they are not shaped like tortoises, they are called ang yi (红圆)。
When we have new babies in the house, it is common to give these to friends and family members. For girls, we would give the tortoise shaped ones and for boys, the round ones.
Today, I have made my 紅龜粿 with no coloring at all. I used colored sweet potatoes to get the colors and for red, beet root. I deliberately left some bits of the roots in the flour just for fun. I also mixed the dough to marble these cakes. I think they look wonderful. They taste good too.
If you want them to be more QQ, then beat them a bit more, and a tablespoonful of wheat starch for each portion of the dough. I like mine this way.
