It’s that time of year again and mooncakes are everywhere in the Asian grocery stores here in San Jose. It makes me a little wistful for Malaysia, as I was making them myself last year when I could easily get my hands on ready-made mooncake fillings. Thankfully, a friend from Singapore visited me just about a week back and brought me some mooncake filling so I will at least get to make some this year.
Last year, besides making traditional baked mooncakes, piggy mooncakes and spiral mooncakes, I decided I was going to give snowskin mooncakes another try to get them more perfect (we weren’t too happy with our first attempt). I also bought a book all about mooncakes called “Mooncake Sonata” by Alan Ooi and the recipes in there really helped me to perfect those snowskin types.
I’m going to share with you one of the snowskin mooncakes that was really popular when I was selling them last year—this pandan custard snowskin mooncake. It is a little bit more complicated to make as there are multiple steps but the cake itself is so pretty and the flavors so yummy that you have to give it a try.
Today’s creation for the Royal Selangor Jellyriffic Challenge is something near and dear to my heart: Spam musubi. Being from Hawaii, I grew up eating these all-in-one meals. We still do make Spam musubi here in Kuching, from time to time, breaking into our supply of Spam that my Mom thankfully brings each time she visits (Spam being substantially cheaper in Hawaii than anywhere else). But we haven’t done it lately, so this challenge is a good excuse to make some again!
Spam Musubi and Ume Musubi
Most musubi are trangle-shaped, like the ones sold at Mana Bu’s musubi shop in Honolulu. We don’t have a triangle-shaped musubi mold, but we do have the Royal Selangor Jelly Mould to shape the musubi! Putting the musubi together couldn’t have been easier.
We made enough Rice Krispies treats to feed a small army…
We had a pretty busy weekend, and it was tough finding time to make anything with the Royal Selangor Jelly Mould for the Jellyriffic Challenge. We were hoping to do at least 4 different creations but ended up only doing 3: yesterday’s Jelly Doughnuts, today’s Rice Krispies treats, and another one for tomorrow.
We had a birthday party to attend in the evening, so we decided to make these Rice Krispies as a dessert offering. The Rice Krispies treats were pretty easy to prepare, but the assembling took a lot of work, especially when the Krispies started to get cool.
You’ve heard of Spam fried rice before…but olive fried rice? Well, not really olives but buah dabai – the indigenous “Sibu Olive”. Dabai is grown exclusively on the island of Borneo, in the Rajang River basin of central Sarawak, from the interior areas of Kapit all the way out to Sibu and Sarikei on the coast. It’s one of the unique foods of Sarawak.
