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Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine

Published February 2nd, 2007 in Desserts. 16 Comments

Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine 2

Valentines day is coming up soon. Valentines day in Korea is a bit different to most countries’. It is the day for a girl to confess her love to a guy by giving him a chocolate present. Then when does the guy have a chance to confess his love? The guy has a chance to confess his love by giving her some candy presents on so called White day, which is March 14th. Whether you have the chance to confess your love on Valentines day or White day, I think both days in Korea are very commercialized.

 

Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine 3

However here comes my pure love for you, and my husband of course. I represent my love with these strawberry rice cakes - ddalgi chapssalddeok (딸기 찹쌀떡) in Korean and a type of Mochi in Japan. I decided to join “Monthly Mingle” hosted by What’s for Lunch Honney? This month’s theme is sweet love and I am supposed to create something sweet to fit the theme. I have been thinking a lot about what to make, something sweet, luxurious, and that also fits My Korean Kitchen’s theme, and this strawberry chapssalddeok is what I came up with. Rice cake is Michael’s favourite Korean snack and is also a very frequently requested recipe by my readers.

Ingredients

-Dough for 3-4 strawberry rice cakes

  • Glutinous rice flour (찹쌀가루, Chapssalgaru) - 1 cup
  • Water - 2/3 cup
  • Salt - 1/2 tsp
  • White sugar - 8 tsp

-Red bean paste for 25-30 rice cakes

  • Red beans (팥, pat) - 250 g
  • Water - 6 cups
  • Salt - 1 tsp
  • Honey - 50 ml
  • White sugar - 2 tsp (You might want to add more sugar if you want a fairly sweet taste. Mine wasn’t as sweet as the ones from a shop)
  • Water - 1 cup

-Strawberries (rinsed, stem off, and dried) - same as the number of rice cakes you are going to make.

-Some starch powder (anti sticky purpose, I used it a lot. I only had potato starch, but a rice starch may be better).

Steps (for red bean paste)Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine step1

  1. Rinse the red beans. Put the red beans in a pot and add the water (6 cups).
  2. Simmer it until they turn out to be easily crushable. (I boiled it for 40 minutes and the paste turned out to be a bit rough still. So if you want to make really fine red bean paste you need to boil it a lot longer with more water. )
  3. Take out the beans, leave them to cool down for 5 minutes and put them into a mixer.
  4. Blend them.
  5. Add the water (1 cup), honey, white sugar, and salt. Blend it again.
  6. Put the blended red bean paste into a pot or wok and dry it on medium to low heat until the moisture evaporates enough so it is a paste.

Steps (for dough, you will need a microwave)Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine step2

  1. Sieve the glutinous rice flour, salt and sugar two times.
  2. Add the water and mix them well (it will now look like milk).
  3. Put it into a microwavable container.
  4. Cook it on high for 3 minutes in a microwave. (I don’t know how your microwave works, but that is how I did it. The purpose is to make it doughy)
  5. Take out the container and stir it well.
  6. Put it back to the microwave and repeat steps 4 and 5 two times more. (So, you use the microwave for a total of 9 minutes.)
  7. Let it cool for 5 minutes.Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine step3
  8. Spread well some starch powder on a plate (cover the plate throughly) and pour out the dough from the container. Put the starch powder onto the dough so that it doesn’t stick on your hand.
  9. Divide the dough into 3-4 pieces.

Final steps

  1. Spread the dough on your hand and add the red bean paste and a strawberry on top.
  2. Seal it.
  3. Serve it on the plate. (You need to eat it within 2 hours after you make it. Otherwise the dough will go soggy.)

What can I do with left over red bean paste?

You can keep it the in the freezer and make more chapssalddeok later on. You can also add it on top when you make Patbingsu (snow corn) .

Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine 1

You can’t imagine how hard it was for me to make these. It took me 7 hours (including failures) to save 6 successful chapssalddeok. I aimed to make 20-30 of them though. When I started it, I thought it would be easy, but it wasn’t. :( It was very sticky and very hard to make proper dough that doesn’t stick onto my palm. I also had to visit my mom to borrow her microwave too. I was going to make it the traditional way (without a microwave) but it failed. So I learnt again how hard it can be to express my love to you. ;) Of course the recipe I’m showing you here is the final version that actually works (though it could be better). It took me about 2 hours for the final version but that includes a lot of extra red bean paste.

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Glutinous Black Rice Cakes

Published December 27th, 2006 in Desserts. 4 Comments

Glutinous Black Rice Cakes

Michael brought some interesting looking rice cakes from school today. He said one of his colleagues gave them to him. He tends to bring food home from school when he isn’t sure about it, so I am basically a his poison tester. :) I haven’t seen these kind of rice cake before so I didn’t know what it was called at first.

I tasted a bit, it was glutinous and sweet. It has some beans, seeds, and Chinese red dates, as you can see, it looks and feels really healthy too.

When I confirmed that it is not contaminated, Michael had small bite too (he has some allergies). He liked it and he asked for more bites.

I researched on the internet a little bit and not long after I found what it is called. It is called Hkmi Chal Ddeok (흑미찰떡) in Korean, which means glutinous black rice cake. So I added this rice cake on my do recipe list.

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Strawberry Rice Cakes for My Valentine

Colorful Rice Cake (Mujigae Ddeok in Korean)

Sticky Rice Cakes (Chapssalddeok in Korean)

Sweet Rice Cake (Gyongdan in Korean)


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Frozen Cheese Cake

Published December 5th, 2006 in Bread and Bakery and Desserts. 8 Comments

We have a regular gathering with some other foreigners living in this area every second Wednesday. We have dinner in one person’s house and we take turns. The host prepares a main meal and everyone else brings their duty dish. Anyhow, Mel (most of the time dessert duty person) brought this cheese cake at the last gathering, and since then I fell in love with it. She usually brings home made dessert, but she brought frozen cheese cake that day. (She mustn’t have had much time to cook.)

Not realizing that it was from Homeplus, I kept saying how delicious it was and I wanted to have some more, etc. Michael was surprised because it is a very unusual comment for me to say something like that for a dessert. Because most of the time desserts are just too sweet for me. I guess most Canadians and Americans can cope with it, because I know they keep helping themselves until it is all gone. Yet I’ve never finished one piece of dessert ever so far, I usually pass mine on to Michael (When I think I am done.)
So I guess, me saying that I want more could have hurt her feelings.

After knowing where she got it from, we eagerly looked for the cheese cake when we went grocery shopping at Homeplus the other day. When we found it, I nearly fainted because its price was so high.

It was 15,950 won (US $17) for that smallish medium size cake. Come on! It is not even a bakery made cheese cake, it is just a frozen cheese cake from the factory. Michael encouraged me “Not” to buy it because of the ridicules price. So I gave up.

When I came home from shopping, I was thinking about the cake more and more. I become a slave of it. So what!
Yes, I finally bought cheese cake yesterday. Michael found out about the fact near the cash register, though he couldn’t convince me not to buy it anymore.
This is a picture of cheese cake I was craving for days and days.

cheese cake box

The pieces are individually packed as usual for Korean snacks. :)

individually packed cheese cakes

How to defrost :

  • You just defrost it one piece at a time (or more, if you going to have more)
    You can defrost it in the fridge for 1 hour or at room temperature for 30-40 minutes (It was written on the box).

I took out 4 pieces to have (2 each), and Michael said that he finds frozen cheese cake tastes better, so we decided to defrost 2 pieces, and eat 2 pieces of frozen cakes. It was OK to have frozen cheese cake though it was a bit too hard to break it with a fork and hard to taste the cheese. He added the comment later that he likes frozen ones better because he doesn’t like the creamy taste. Dude! If you had mentioned that part I would have waited 30 minutes for both. The picture just below is a piece of frozen cheese cake.

Frozen cheese cake

After waiting 30 minutes to taste a defrosted piece at room temperature, I added some strawberry jam on top and tasted it. It was fabulous. It was very creamy and soft, a little bit sweet from the strawberry jam, it was the best cake ever. (We don’t have many good cakes in Korea. 90% of cakes are sponge cake and are all sweet as far as I know.)

Cheese cake with strawberry jam

I’ve never had cheese cake from a cake shop or bakery, so it is not possible for me to compare them, though it was really good as a cheese cake from a supermarket.

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