No, “bubur cha cha” isn’t a type of dance. It’s a sweet, coconut-based soup that we enjoy quite often here in Malaysia. But the recipe is a bit different from our Honeydew Sago Dessert recipe, our Indonesian Es Teler recipe, or the cendol that we enjoyed back in Penang. Bubur cha cha is a Nyonya dish made with different types of sweet potatoes and yam (or Chinese taro). To the sweet potatoes, you add a little pearl tapioca for a textural counterpoint.
Bubur Cha Cha
In Hawaii, you could find something similar in Vietnamese restaurants except that their versions were more pudding-like with more tapioca pearls than sweet potatoes. And I believe in the Philippines, they add bananas to their version.
We discovered a delicious Penang family recipe that was almost forgotten.
Whenever we goback to Penang, I always make sure that I come home with some goodies. One of the most popular things to take away from Penang (and no, unfortunately, we can’t pack their char koay teow, or Asam Laksa) is the biscuits evidenced by the number of people on our flight back to Kuching hand-carrying boxes and boxes of these wonderful pastries.
Just in time for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, a special moon cake recipe that will make your head spin.
I have a friend here in Kuching who loves to garden. And since she lives next to an empty plot of land, she has put it to good use by cultivating it. When she mentioned that she grew purple sweet potatoes, I was hopeful that they were Okinawan sweet potatoes. I had to ask her if I could come by her house to help her harvest some.
Turns out she got really busy the weekend that we were going but she did dig up some to give to me. The ones she gave me were purple mixed with white and they were dry in texture. In some ways they reminded me of taro (yams) but a little sweeter. And later I found out that they were known as taro sweet potatoes. Well…that explains it…
Despite their dryness (or maybe because of it), I had the idea that I would boil them, mash them and then add some butter, milk and sugar and make them into a paste and use them as a filling for this pastry. After all, during the Mooncake festival, we find Shanghai mooncakes filled with taro which are very similar in size and shape to these pastries.
