Happy Year of the Tiger!
Welcome to my new blog! Having the inaugural post during Lunar New Year seemed like the perfect way to start things off.
Tang yuan (湯圓) is one of my favorite Chinese desserts. It’s name is a homophone for reunion and so traditionally, it’s eaten at family gatherings during festivals. The first time I made tang yuan was with my friend, Shirley, to celebrate the Year of the Rat. We were hundreds of kilometers away from our families (the first Chinese New Year that I had ever spent away from my parents and siblings) and the sweet rice balls were a little taste of home. Despite a lack of experience, I ambitiously tried to shape them like rats and was very happy with how they turned out.
This year, with rose-tinted memories of my previous success, I decided to try making tiger-shaped tang yuan. I have to give Shirley credit for humouring me, and for mixing all the dough and the filling. For the most part, we followed the recipe from The Woks of Life but we used hot water to mix the dough instead, and we skipped step 3 where it says to cook a small piece of dough and incorporate it back into the mix. The dough still turned out smooth and pliable despite our shortcut.
The initial intention was to have three different coloured doughs: orange for the base, and black and white for the features. Shirley made a lovely orange by using a combination of yellow and red Wilton gel icing colours. The black was coloured straight from the gel jar while the white dough was simply left uncoloured. While she prepared the doughs, I shaped the sesame paste into 1.5 – 2 cm balls and placed them in the freezer to harden.
We kept the doughs covered in a bowl submerged in a warm water bath to keep them soft and moldable. Cooled dough is lumpy and prone to cracking as you can see from the pictures of our uncooked tang yuan. I found the trickiest part of the whole process was having to work quickly to sculpt the figures. I had forgotten how frustrating it was to coax tiny, crumbling pieces of dough into the shapes I wanted.
Once all the components were prepared, we took the solidified sesame fillings out of the freezer and wrapped each of them in a layer of orange dough. Rolling out smooth spheres was easier with firm centres. We made 9 of the balls into tigers, and for each, I rolled out a pea of white dough, flattened it and stuck the disc on an orange ball to start the face. For eyes, I maneuvered two black sesame seeds into place with a toothpick and added one seed for the nose. Two smaller balls of orange dough were placed on either side of the head for ears; I pinched the top of each to form points.
Getting the stripes right took some trial and error. We first rolled out thin strips of black/grey dough intending to adhere them onto the surface of the orange balls. Unfortunately, there was a limit to how thin the dough would roll and the resulting look was bulky (as you can see for the front row in the photo at the top). It was also laborious and our dough was losing malleability in the meantime. We then considered painting the stripes with straight gel colour but we were worried that unincorporated colouring would turn all the water black when we cooked the tang yuan. We didn’t want to end up dyeing everything an unappetizing grey. In the end though, the prospect of finishing faster trumped all our aesthetic concerns. I used a toothpick to paint on the stripes.
Cooking them was simple: we dropped the tang yuan in a pot of boiling water. Some of the colour from the black stripes did bleed off into the water but it did not dye our tang yuan like we feared. I didn’t time exactly how long they took to cook but I watched for them to turn soft and slightly translucent before fishing them out.
Boiling them made the orange more vibrant but muted the black. Their squishy, blob-like shape reminded me of Tsum Tsums. I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of one that had been bitten in half but the filling was smooth with just the right sweetness. Overall, I am satisfied with how they turned out. It was a lot of work but definitely worth it. Animal-shaped tang yuan may become an annual tradition for me – at least until I finish all the zodiac animals!
