Steamed Custard Buns//Love

Last Friday night while teaching the kiddies their lesson on loving others I realized how innocent child crushes could easily turn into a problem. It started out with our craft and here's the details: The lesson was a fusion between loving people (family, friends and bullies) and the commercialized valentine's day, so the point of our craft was to make a valentine's letter to their parents or friends for being so wonderful to them. While most of the kids were making a cute mess of their letters for their loved ones, the eldest of the group was making an extravagant heart shaped valentine for a boy named J. which deviated from our lesson/plan.

Yes, it's cute watching young children talk about their crushes and them being entirely innocent about them, but when this girl decided to make this valentine for her crush, it made me a tad bit worried. I remember that one year during a workshop during summer camp, the speaker shared about the "sandwich". The "sandwich" was an analogy of the steps in a relationship, and so buttering the bread was the first step. He explained that although the first step could be innocent and simple, it could easily lead the person to the final stage. It was made clear to us that we should only date or have relationships if we were ready for the long to relationship of marriage.

Although I wouldn't say that I'm an expert on a topic such as love, I'm sure that some of these young girls in senior elementary school years and junior high would benefit from having girl/boy talk. Because of our society today, they could easily be peer pressured into wanting to date early which will give a bit of their heart away each and every time they enter a relationship. It's totally not a problem for them to have crushes, but I believe that if they act on their idea of "love" they might get hurt.
The girl probably won't get into such problems yet... but you know unexpected things can always happen and you can't deny the drama that happens during teen age years.

HAHA wow.. don't take any of that into mind, I just felt obligated to blabber. =D

Anyways, Happy Valentine's Day / Happy Single Awareness Day! Hope you have a great day with your significant other, otherwise having a blast with your family and friends doing plain old regular things.

During this past weekend, I felt an urge to make steamed buns. Especially steamed custard buns known as lai wong bao 奶黄包. Lai wong bao(s) are often served as a dim sum dish. Depending where you go, they are either delicious or tasteless and dry. Some restaurants have a thick bread layer which I hate since I love eating the custard middle of these buns. To fit my picky eating habits of wanting less dry bread, I found a recipe online which made one of the best soft and chewy bread with custard. Although I didn't follow the custard recipe exactly, It's decent enough that you could use it but just be sure to add 2-4 tbsp on sugar when cooking the custard so that it'll be sweet (don't put too much otherwise it gets sickening).

Click here for the recipe used.

To make the pig face and heart, I pulled off a ping pong ball size of dough and added pink food gel colouring. I use triangles for the ears and rounded rectangles for the snout. The pieces were "glued" on by using a drop of water for each piece before they were steamed. The eyes were made of seaweed circles.

Pig brains? Mmm they sure taste good.

I also made steamed veggie pork buns during the weekend. They were my lunch for a while. No recipe for this because the meat mixture was so randomly created but it turned out yummy. ^^