Winter Solstice Festival 2013 with Tangyuan

Today marks another year of the Winter Solstice Festival.  I can’t believe how time passes us so quickly and it is going to be another new year in less than two weeks time.  If you don’t know what the Winter Solstice Festival/Dongzhi is and why we are celebrating it, please click here to read what I had wrote in last year’s blog post.

If you ever go to Singapore for a holiday, you can find Tangyuen as part of our common desserts dishes.  It’s not restricted to this festival though as you can eat it all year around.  They are in fact, very easy to make.  You will only need glutinous rice flour and mix with water.  I don’t add sugar with the glutinous rice flour unless you are not having peanut coating or having it with a sweet soup base.  You can see my old post on how to make it on the top link.  If you don’t want to make it yourself, you can buy frozen ready made Tangyuen in most Chinese supermarkets in the UK.  They mostly come with fillings inside the Tangyuen like sesame, red bean or peanut paste.

For those who like their Tangyuen in sweet soup base, there are a lot of simple soup recipes to make. Although I personally am not keen on the soup bases, my mum used to cook the soup base with ginger, rock sugar and pandan leaves.  Or if you prefer, you can make a sesame paste soup with your Tangyuen. My favourite way to eat it though is to coat them with sweet peanut powder.

This is our Chinese culture that I would like to pass onto my children and hope they will practise it when they get older.