Red Tortoise Cake :: 紅龜粿

In the suitcases, were baking moulds for dear T. Three aluminium kuih kapit, three wooden kuih bangkit and four wooden ang ku kueh. She has plastic moulds and want those 'proper' wooden ones. She grew up nowhere near Southeast Asia with no relatives or friends in the region either. She's a whizz at making pies, puddings and angel food cakes (looks like what I know as chiffon cake), etc. It was only after she met and married the Singaporean husband, then she learnt how to make 'kueh/kuih'. She wanted the new moulds to make ang ku kueh (紅龜粿), a dessert that her husband and kids really like. For fun, I also bought her an ang ku kueh tote bag. Hurhurhur.

T knows I can't stand the smell of dough, butter, flour and baking. She was done with kneading the rice flour for the skin and cooking the filling. She was waiting for me to come play minion. Frankly, the dough and the steaming of kueh don't smell as bad as cakes or bread. She couldn't afford to have the dough dry out, so we would have to wrap the dough around the mung bean paste/filling fast and whack the mould on the globs and dump them in the steamer. I like the whacking bit.

Probably because I'm not in Singapore, and since a whole steamer of blobs have been made, I gamely took a piece to nibble on. It was only recently that I learnt 'ang ku kueh' literally translates to 'red tortoise cake'. It didn't feature in my childhood diet and I still don't speak or understand much Hokkien. As noob as I am when it comes to dessert, I think this one is way better than the commercial ones. Definitely better than those from Everton Park's Ji Xiang Confectionery, and Poh Cheu at Bukit Merah. Something about this batch- the smoothness of the not-so-sweet filling and the thinness of the skin. The ratio of skin versus filling was fantastic. Went great with coffee.