Pandan and Coconut Cream Chinese New Year Cakes

 

This year's Chinese New Year Cake was fun adventure with Pandan and Coconut Cream.

I also made the regular brown sugar ones.

 Mix well. 

 Use scissors to chop red dates, JUJUBE, and deseed them.

 

 Use Avocado cooking oil, if you can. 

 Be sure to oil the cake pan and aluminum foil or parchment paper very well to keep glutinous rice dough from sticking to the mold and for easy removal when done.  Organic parchment paper would work also, but still oil well.

 Red date - JUJUBE - seed removed.

 Taro root paste can be prepared a couple of days ahead.  Boil taro root (use pressure cooker), add sugar (to your liking) and cook at low heat until most of the liquid evaporates and thick paste forms.

Layer dough and taro filling.

Preheat water to rolling boil.  Make sure to fill the water to the highest point possible to steam for two hours.

Before checking for water level at 1-1/2  hrs, be sure to have a large pot of boiling water for refill ready.  Refill the the steamer pot really really quickly.

 After two hours of steaming.

 

To make Pandan Coconut Cream Chinese New Year Cake, you need fresh pandan leaves.  I do not like to use those pandan extract in a bottle because they are not natural and it contains food colors.

 Slice or scissor cut washed pandan leaves.  Add them to the InstaPot food processor.  Add warm water per recipe's liquid requirement. Or any food processor that can handle pureeing very tough fibrous greens.  Check out my methods in other postings I did. I got this InstaPot during holiday sales.

 I get to use my InstaPot to Puree the Pandan leaves.  Add pandan leaves and reasonable amount of water.  And it worked excellently.  There were about 6 to 7 cups of chopped pandan leaves. I processed them in two batches.  Approximately 2 cups of water to 3 cups of pandan leaves.
The blades and motor are powerful enough to puree the rough pandan leaves.

 Put the puree'd pandan through fine sieve to extract as much juice.

 Mixed extracted pandan juice with Glutinous Rice flour.

 It worked out great.  The green color is natural and beautiful.   It does not need any food coloring to make it green.  The InstaPot puree'd  very well.

 The other part of the MOCHI flour or the glutinous rice flour is mixed with coconut cream and hot water mixture. 

 Didn't do a good job in making a large disc, but it should work out just fine when steamed.

 Spread the steamer cloth across the steamer to catch evaporation drops from the lid.

 Here it is after 2 hours of steaming.

 Slice and EAT!

 I will try to do a better job the next time, but,,, it is sooo delicious!!