Tag: Dessert

S’more Gyeongdan

S’mores!  The combination of graham crackers, gooey marshmallow and chocolate is an American classic that has found so many sweet applications, like cupcakes, bars, shakes, etc. So it’s only natural that I try my own take on s’more for an easy sweet-tooth fix…
…and you are probably not surprised I made rice cakes with these ingredients. Gyeongdan (경단) is a quick and easy kind of rice cakes made by boiling small balls of sweet rice flour dough, a.k.a. glutinous rice flour (despite no gluten in the flour…so confusing). They are often rolled in sponge cake crumbs or toasted bean powder (콩고물 – kong go mul) which only enhance their already cute looks and flavors.
Now you can enjoy a soft Korean rendition of s’mores from this sweet gyeongdan, with the rice flour wrapper as a snug pocket for holding melted chocolate chips and marshmallow bits together.
These gyeongdan are best, soft and slightly chewy, when they’re warm. If necessary, you can re-heat them, covered, in the microwave for 30 seconds (more or less, depending on the number of gyeongdan) before serving. I have to warn you though there is a chance that the chocolate and marshmallow filling might burst out in the microwave (how do I know this…?). This doesn’t affect taste much, just not the most well put-together pieces of gyeongdan at this point.
If you want to make ahead, make gyeongdan but don’t boil them. Place gyeongdan on a plate, not touching each other, and freeze for a couple of hours until they are firm.  Keep them in a plastic bag in the freezer. When you are ready to serve, go directly from the freezer to boiling water, then roll in graham cracker crumbs.
RELATED POSTS
Orange Seolgi (설기)
Patbingsu Cupcakes (팥빙수 컵케이크)
KOREAN WORDS
ice    얼음    (eol eum, which becomes ‘eo reum’ in actual pronounciation)
adult  어른   (eo reun)
January 17, 2012
Experiment: Korean Petit Fours
Trying to get into baking. I have an oven–something that is not too common in Korean households. So I should take advantage of it. I made a successful Coconut Rum Raisin Pound Cake a few weeks ago. Then I tried my hand at a Coffee Angel Food Cake, which ended up in the trash. Then I got cocky and thought I could make Petit Fours.
I hadn’t had Petit Fours since I was a kid, sneaking them out of my grandparents’ refrigerator. They’re delicate cakes filled with jam and/or cream covered in chocolate, bon-bon size. I thought I’d try to make some simple ones with Korean flavors.
I started with the Hot Milk Sponge Cake recipe from Joy of Cooking.
I sliced off the top and then sliced the cake in half.
Warmed up a little Yuja Cha. You knew I was going to do this, did you? We love Yuja Cha at ZenKimchi.
Spread the Yuja Cha thinly over the bottom half.
Placed the other half on top.
Then I got my favorite bittersweet chocolate and started melting it in a stainless steel bowl over boiling water.
Added 5-6 Tablespoons of butter.
Threw in a few tablespoons of Bokbunja Raspberry Liqueur and turned off the heat.
I cut the cakes into cubes, quickly dipped the bottoms in the chocolate and set them on a Silpat.
I think there’s a lot I can learn in the delicacy department.
I then covered the rest of them with chocolate and chilled them.
Didn’t turn out too bad, despite appearances. The chocolate was still very gooey, so next time I’ll put in less butter. The Yuja Cha gives them a Christmas-y flavor. We ate these with our morning coffee for the next few days.
Any other interesting baking ideas?

November 11, 2011
Patbingsu Cupcakes
Do you have leftover ingredients for patbingsu (팥빙수; shaved ice with sweetened red beans and mini rice cakes) still sitting in the refrigerator? Well, I did. After making it all summer long, it’s become too cold all of a sudden to enjoy patbingsu every day.
So I autumn-mized patbingsu my way.  I guess the name is a bit misleading, since there is no ice in the patbingsu cupcake.  But I couldn’t come up with a better name for these cupcakes that incorporate the essential patbingsu ingredients of sweetened red beans, mini rice cakes and condensed milk. The cupcake itself is soft and moist from using oil and yogurt instead of butter. The patbingsu ingredients are reminiscent of summer, but the warm, gooey-stickiness from melted rice cakes in the cupcakes has finally helped me transition my mind to autumn.  Sweet red beans in soft cake also takes you a step closer to the winter street snack of bungeo bbang (붕어빵; fish-shaped cake filled with sweet red beans).
A cupcake version of a traditional Korean summertime treat

KOREAN WORDS
condensed milk   연유   (yeon yu)
milk                    우유   (wu yu)
October 5, 2011
Kongbiji Green Tea Cookies

Ever since I discovered how kongbiji (콩비지; soy pulp or okara) complemented cookies and tteok (떡; rice cake) with its subtly nutty bite and flavor, it became an ingredient I always keep in the freezer.  Although it is considered a by-product of making soy milk or tofu, I’ve been making soy milk to specifically get kongbiji these days.
This one also utilizes different flours – regular all-purpose flour, white rice flour and sweet rice flour (mochiko) – a lazy result from one day when I was all ready to make butter cookies and realized I only had one last scoop of wheat flour.  Sure, I’d spend all afternoon to bake dozens of cookies, but leaving home and walking a block to buy a bag of flour felt like such a laborious task at that moment.  So I used flours I already had handy and was happy to find a new combination that worked for butter cookies. The textural difference compared to using just all-purpose flour is minimal, but some of you may notice ever-so-slightly softer cookies with the rice flour mix. Don’t worry, the sandy bites still come from kongbiji.
Together with light bitterness from green tea and melted chocolate drizzled over, just remember that you are taking in all the good soy nutrition from these one-bite cookies and conveniently forget about buttery fat along with mundane daily chores.
Tasty and healthy cookies to make with the leftovers from making tofu
For my other related posts, you can click on the links below.
Making Soy Pulp, Soy Milk and Tofu at Home
Sable Cookies with Soy Pulp – Cranberry Orange & Sesame Mugwort
Zucchini – Soy Pulp Cupcakes (애호박 비지 미니떡)
KOREAN WORDS
bean   콩   kong
ball     공   gong
bear    곰   gom
June 17, 2011
Review: Jade Chocolate's Confections Promote Free Flavor Love
A little chocolate is like a love affair — an occasional sweet release that lightens the spirit. —Linda Solegato
If chocolate is a lover, it’s not monogamous. Chocolate shares itself easily with most fruits, nuts, some legumes, tea wine and even flowers.
Mindy Fong, owner and proprietor of Jade Chocolates in San Francisco, brings a true pan-Asian flair to her confections. Many chocolatiers pair their treats with “safe” Asian ingredients, such as green tea, jasmine tea and ginger.
Fong encourages her chocolates to share themselves with more exotic Asian partners such as dried mangoes (sometimes shaped like orchids), roasted sesame seeds, roasted brown rice, lemongrass, tamari-soaked almonds, lapang souchong tea and ylang ylang flowers.
I had a chance to talk to her recently at Napa Chocolate Salon, held in the upper Napa Valley town of Yountville. The venue was just a few blocks from the world-famous Bouchon Bakery, owned by chef Thomas Keller of French Laundry acclaim.
What foods or flavors wouldn’t Fong mix with chocolate?
“Chocolate is basic, like black and white,” she replied. “It complements many different flavors.”
Just as I suspected: Chocolate is a sensory swinger, freely giving out love to everyone.
Jade Chocolate's chocolate covered edamame, just waiting to be sampled. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
Jade Chocolate’s chocolate-covered edamame (soybeans) seemed like odd match-making. Fong dry-roasts the edamame, bathes them in bittersweet chocolate then dusts on bittersweet chocolate powder and sea salt.
I was expecting a “beany” taste, but I didn’t detect it. When edamame is roasted, the legumes taste similar to a peanut but more subtle, she told me. I now concur. Yet the inside of her enhanced edamame had more crunch than I’d expect from a chocolate-covered roasted peanut.
Two kinds of flavors, Fong said, don’t complement chocolate well:
1. “Delicate flavors.”
2. Flavors with a similar “earthy” profile to chocolate.
Pu-er tea, she pointed out, has a strong “earthy” flavor that muddies the flavor of any variety of chocolate.
Korea has its own perplexing pairing. Kimchi chocolate has a zippy liquid center. If spicy pickled cabbage spiked with hints of garlic, ginger and fish sauce can tango with chocolate, then just about anything else can do so too.
Chocolate is most seductive, it seems, when it is matched with complementary but equally strong flavors, just as people are. It may not be a choosy lover, but chocolate certainly performs well on play dates.
June 14, 2011
Coffee Seolgi
I’m back to seolgi (설기), steamed cake made with rice flour, sugar and water at its simplest form. This time, together with instant coffee in milk and finely chopped walnuts, a new seolgi is born as an afternoon pick-me-up coffee cake that goes great with, what else, a cup of coffee.
In itself is a guilt-free, mildly sweet dessert. If you are willing to allow yourself a little more ‘guilt,’ drizzle some coffee caramel sauce over it. Or top your coffee seolgi with simple whipped cream.  Or, just maybe, you can try both.  Coffee seolgi topped with whipped cream and drizzled with coffee caramel sauce is – h e a v e n l y ~
You can see more pointers on seolgi from my recent orange seolgi post.
You can also find my other rice cake posts.
Baked Rice Cake with Kabocha
Dancing Ghosts and Sleepy Pumpkin Rice Cakes
First Full Moon Day (정월대보름) and Energy Tteok
Songpyeon (송편; rice cake for Korean Thanksgiving Day)
Zucchini – Soy Pulp Cupcakes (애호박 비지 미니떡)

KOREAN WORDS
snack    간식 (gan sik)
dessert  후식 (hu sik)
April 28, 2011
Korean Pear Charoset
Korean pear charoset paired up with some matzah, romaine lettuce and horseradish spiked with beet juice, for the perfect Hillel Sandwich. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
Last year, I posted a recipe for charoset that was decided non-Korean. This year, I decided to rectify that by making a Korean-style charoset for you. I took my new charoset recipe to our annual Passover seder and it was a big hit.
As I said last Passover,
The traditional Ashkenazi Charoset features apples, raisins, cinnamon and walnuts. I can’t put my finger on the reason that this version of Charoset sets my teeth on edge, but I don’t find it remotely appealing. …I don’t like raisins at all. No amount of cinnamon, sugar or walnuts can change that. I call them “shriveled up, dead fruit.” I’m also not a big fan of apples, at least as the main actor, either.
I still dabble in apples, only in extreme moderation (usually drenched in peanut butter), so this charoset does not use apples. Instead, the Korean pear holds center stage.
April 23, 2011
Orange Seolgi
As long as I can remember, I’ve always preferred rice cakes over breads/pastries if the comparison had to be ever made. Don’t get me wrong, anyone who knows me will testify that I am happy to indulge in all sweet combinations of flour, butter and sugar.
At the base of my preference is the denser, chewier texture I grew up with that I always crave. Yet, what draws me into rice cakes to this day is the subtle, sweet flavors from natural ingredients – dried fruits, nuts, beans and seeds. It also comes with the self-convincing happiness that this sweetness is good and good for me.
Seolgi (설기), referring to steamed rice cakes made with short-grain rice powder, may be one of the simplest kind of rice cakes. Baekseolgi (백설기) is the most well-known one in the seolgi category, as they often appear on the tables of babies’ birthdays and other celebrations. ‘Baek’ means ‘white,’ symbolizing purity, as well as ‘one hundred,’ symbolizing longevity. It is also made with the simple ingredients of rice powder, water and sugar. Other seolgi varieties depend on additional ingredients of fruits, nuts and whatever your imagination brings out.
This time, I added orange zest and orange juice to make seolgi, and garnished with candied orange peels and fresh mint leaves. The rice cake alone is sufficient, but the little garnishes accentuate the subtle tone of the refreshing sweetness. This orange seolgi is also light and soft, yet still with its density that lets you know it belongs to a rice cake family.

To make about 8 muffin-sized orange seolgi)
Take out 2 C of frozen rice powder* and let it rest at room temperature for easier handling. In the meantime, set up a steamer.
Sift rice powder twice. If available, use a coarse sieve to help aerate rice powder without making the rice particles finer. Finer rice powder means denser rice cake.
Add 2 ts of orange zest, 2 TBSP orange juice, 4 TBSP sugar and 1/4 ts of salt and mix thoroughly without pressing down rice powder. It should feel like a moist powder mix.
How do you know when you have a balanced mix? When you squeeze a small amount of the rice powder mix, the shape of the mix should remain (picture below left). When you press the shaped mix gently, it should easily crumble apart (picture below right). You may want to add a couple of drops of orange juice or water if you want your rice cake more moist, but be careful adding any liberal amount of liquid at this point.
Scoop the mix gently in silicon muffin cups (which I did) or paper cups. Do not press down the mix. Line the steamer with a piece of clean cloth or paper towel and place the muffin cups. Steam for 20 minutes over boiling water, then turn off the stove. Let it rest with the lid on for 5 minutes, then remove the steamer from the stove. Cool to room temperature with the lid off.
Optional) Candied Orange Peels – Cut the peel from one orange to strips. Place the strips in cold water and bring up to a boil then drain. Repeat it 3 times total. This process removes the bitterness of the orange peel. Add the orange peels and add equal amounts of sugar and water, just enough to cover the orange peel strips in a small pot. Stir gently to help dissolve sugar and reduce until there is almost no liquid. Transfer the orange peel strips to parchment paper and cool to room temperature.
It is best to enjoy seolgi on the day you make them. You can freeze any leftover and microwave it for serving, but you will lose some of its softness.
- The rice powder (쌀가루; ssal ga ru) used for seolgi is literally rice soaked in water first then ground to powder. This means you need to add only a small amount of water to make seolgi. Unless you live in Korea where you can go to a neighborhood rice mill to get your own batch of fresh rice powder, it is easier, or even your only option, to get a bag of frozen rice powder from a Korean grocery store.
KOREAN WORDS
frozen                  냉동 (naeng dong)
rice, uncooked    쌀     (ssal)
powder/flour     가루  (ga ru)
March 31, 2011
Candied Yuja Peel
The final product is sweet with lots of yuja flavor. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
My quest for fun, tasty alternative uses for 유자 yuja (Asian citron, a.k.a. yuzu in Japanese) and the yuja marmalade commonly used to make the hot drink 유자차 yujacha turns again to a sweet treat from the rind, candied yuja peels.
The earliest record of candied fruits goes back to the 14th century, according to Wikipedia. Candied peels of citrus fruits such as oranges, citrons and lemons were popular in both Europe and Western Asia during the Middle Ages. Arabs call them g’shur purtaghal.
The technique of boiling fruits and/or their peels in sugar syrup preserves the fruit and the rinds from spoiling. In other words, it was a practice of necessity in a seemingly bygone era when “waste not, want not” was a respected maxim.
During the Middle Ages, only the very wealthy — who could afford sugar and citrus fruits — enjoyed candied fruit on a regular basis. Today, thanks to refrigeration and year-long access to many kinds of citrus fruits from various exotic locales, the rich and not-so-rich alike can create and enjoy this recipe.
This recipe was inspired by Closet Cooking‘s recipe for candied orange peel.
Candied yuja peels are delicious by themselves as a little snack or dessert, but they are also delicious dipped in chocolate. They would also make a wonderful garnish for your favorite brownies.
March 16, 2011
Yujacha Rolls
This recipe is simpler than Yujacha Hamantashen but equally delicious. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
In my quest to find more alternative uses for 유자차 yujacha (Asian citron marmalade tea) beyond the traditional Korean hot drink, I came up with a sweet treat, Yujacha Rolls.
These rolls are much quicker to prepare than Yujacha Hamantashen but use the same filling. Hamantashen are triangle-shaped cookies filled with dried fruit or chocolate and traditionally eaten around the Jewish festival of Purim.
If you prefer a sweeter dough, follow the instructions for hamantashen dough.
March 5, 2011