Sunday, February 21, 2010

Chinese Radish Cake and Asian Ice-cream

Steph hosted a Chinese New Year's Eve potluck last Saturday. Kristy loves Chinese Radish Cake and insisted that I should make it. I found a recipe from Irene Wai's blog (It is in Chinese) and veganized it. To make Chinese Radish Cake, you only need to get one or two big juicy Chinese Radishes, commonly known as Daikon, and some very common ingredients:

- 1.5KG Chinese Radish/Daikon
- 4 Shitake Mushroom, finely chopped.

- 1 pack of Blue Lotus smoked Tofu, finely chopped

- Conola Oil (or Peanut Oil, if you wanna be more Chinese)

- 250g Rice Flour

- 150ml Water

- 2 tbs Sesame Seeds


Seasonings:

- 2 tsp Sugar
- 2 tsp Massel "Chicken" stock powder

- to taste, white pepper powder
- to taste, tamari

- to taste, liquid smoke
- to taste, salt

1. Wash, peel and grate the Daikon. Drain the grated Daikon and save the liquid in a bowl.


2. Fry the smoked tofu and mushroom on medium/high until your smoke alarm goes off, season with tamari, salt and liquid smoke. You want it to taste A LITTLE BIT TOO SALTY.

3. Mix rice flour in the Daikon liquid until it reaches a gravy-like thickness. If it is too thick, add some water (little by little) but no more than 150ml.


4. Heat oil the wok or fry pan, fry the grated Daikon on medium/high for a couple of minutes.


5. Lower the heat, add the seasoning and cook the grated Daikon with lid on til soft


6. Add the smoked tofu/mushroom to the Daikon and fry medium/high for around 5mins


7. Turn the heat off, add rice flour paste to the pot and mix


8. Pour the whole thing to a greased cake tin and steam on high fro 1.5 to 2 hours. (Put a toothpick into the cake and if the toothpick is clean, it is ready.)


9. Sprinkle with sesame seeds.


10. Let it cool down and settle.


11. Store the whole cake in a big airtight container and consume within 10days.



And then, you slice and pan fry the cake:

Voila!

Kristy made not one by two types of ice-cream from Vegan Scoop: Green Tea and Red Bean. We put way too much Green Tea powder in the first one but tried to fix it. But it still tasted way too bitter. We also used Chinese Red Bean Paste instead of the fancy Japanese version and Kristy thought it tasted like a generic sweet flavour.


Also read what other bloggers made for the CYN potluck:

Johanna's CYN potluck round up, pearl ball and Apricot Goodness Balls . (Both Gluten Free)
Steph's potluck blog post and her vegan pineapple tart. (Gluten Free)
Vicki's delish gluten free sponge cake. (Gluten Free)
Cindy's Orange Szechuan Pepper Ice-cream(!) (Gluten Free)
Michael's "Disaster" Dumplings (Almost Gluten Free)

On my walkman:
Teen Dream - Beach House

9 comments:

  1. Yuuuuum! Gutted I missed it. Those ice creams look fantastic!

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  2. how interesting to see how you did the radish cakes - I loved these and I was sorry not to taste more of the icecream - I had a tiny bit before leaving and it was really nice - although maybe a tiny bit was all the was needed with the green tea

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  3. Lisa, Cindy is going to make a yummy ice-cream for next potluck.

    You can try to make your own, Johanna. You might need to find the nice Daikon at Vic or Footscray Market though.

    Oh. And I forgot one thing. If you are on Chinese Herbs, you can't eat Daikon/Chinese Radish as it will weaken the effect of the herbs.

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  4. The radish cake sounds really good, and the ice creams look great!

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  5. Generic sweet flavour is still really good! The radish cake was delicious as well.

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  6. I think I may love you - this looks EXACTLY like the daikon raddish cakes that they had at Magic Wok/Leader Bowl in Sunnybank (before it closed)!!!!! You ROCK!

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  7. I like how your list of other people's blog posts sort of highlights Michael's "almost" :oP

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  8. The ice creams definitely look fantastic - and I'm sure they tasted great. Mostly though I'm excited about the radish cake recipe - I've never tried radish cake, but have seen it pop up on people's blogs about yum cha before. Hurrah for doable recipes!

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  9. The cake sounds awesome. And I must say, I love your recipe instructions :) The ice creams look great too!

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