Pressure Cooker Red Bean Soup

Red Bean Soup!

If you are not Asian you probably think this dish sounds kindda gross. But this is actually a dessert. A sweet porridge-like dessert made from red beans. They do sell this at food courts, but they are usually very stingy with the beans, so with every scoop, there's only a few beans floating around in the sweet soup. So sad.. When you make this at home, you can have a whole spoon of beans with every bite!

Shiok!!

Plus, do you know they are super good for you? Red beans are packed with protein, vitamins and minerals. Dessert that is actaully good for you!

The traditional way of cooking it is quite straight forward. Just put the beans in water and boil. But like all dried beans, it takes FOREVER to cook, and boiling over is unavoidable and messy. Not forgetting constantly checking it to make sure the water didn't dry up or burnt at the bottom of the pot! With the pressure cooker, all I had to do was to put everything into the pot, press 2 buttons and wait. Clean and simple!

In fact, this dish is so easy to make, I decided to just let the 2 babies do it for me. All they have to do is to follow the recipe I wrote down. Turned out that making the dish wasn't the difficult part. I forgot that my 2 babies HAD to fight about EVERYTHING. There was so much shouting, including myself, that I had to edit out the noise.. 😅

Sibling rivalry aside, the red bean soup was delicious. But when I gave it to Hubby, he ate it quietly and said, "I prefer green bean soup.."

😑

So I made green bean soup by myself the next day, and I literally only took less than 5 minutes before pressing the START button. Haha... everything really IS more difficult when the kids are around!

The green bean soup was also just as good. The beans were intact but soft and cooked. The dish was sweet and satisfying~!

You can enjoy the dessert :

• Warm
• Chilled
• Blended
• even as a side with ice cream!

OK, will stop talking now and give you the recipe.

RED / GREEN BEAN SOUP
makes 3 generous bowls

1/2 cup dried red/green beans
2 tablespoons glutinous rice **
1 stick of 片糖 (70g Chinese brown sugar)
2 pcs of Pandan leaves (tied into a knot)
2.5 cups of water

** Optional: Adding glutinous rice makes the dessert more sticky and thick.

1. Wash the beans and rice with water and drain well. 
2. Add all ingredients into the pressure cooker pot. Close the cover, make sure the pressure seal is closed. 
3. Choose 'BEAN' mode and press 'START'. Let the pressure cooker cook (30 minutes) and allow it to naturally release it's pressure by itself. (about 20-30mins) 
4. Adjust the thickness of the soup and sweetness according to your own preference. E.g. If you want it thinner, add water and bring it to a boil before serving.
5. Serve as is or with a drizzle of coconut cream.

Super cute ladybug steamed cakes!

I 1st saw this cake on a YouTube video, but it didn't post the details of the recipe, so I couldn't try it out. Interestingly a few months later a friend posted it on Facebook but still I didn't try it out. Last week another friend made it and posted it on Facebook, this time with a weblink to the recipe! This is perfect timing because my girl would be having her last day in K1 and I wanted to make something for her class to enjoy.

Original recipe from Mui Mui's blog (I made some adjustments)

Ingredients
3 cold eggs
1 tsp condensed milk
220g castor sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence

275g plain flour
3 tsp baking powder
150ml fresh milk

1. Put eggs, condensed milk, sugar and vanilla in a mixing bowl and beat with medium high speed for 6 minutes or until ribbon stage. 
2. Sift flour and baking powder together. Alternate folding half of the flour mixture and milk into the egg mixture. 
3. Take 1 tbsp plain mixture and put into a piping bag. Take 3 tbsp plain mixture, mix with 1.5 tsp cocoa powder and put into piping bag. Colour the rest of the mixing with bright red and filled into a piping bag. 
4. Pump the red into a paper cup about 80% full. Draw a cross with the brown mixture and do dots on both sides. Colour the upper half of the cross brown and make 2 plain dots for the eye and fill the inside with the plain mixture. 
5. Steam with medium high heat. 12 minutes for full sized cupcakes and 6 minutes for mini cupcakes.

I have a giant steamer, but my muffin tins is rectangular so it doesn't fit into the steamer. So I had to use my mini cupcake moulds. Even before steaming, they looked really cute already! Hope they turned out well!

Oh my gosh can you imagine my delight when I opened the lid of my steamer after 6 minutes! A bunch of mini lady bugs looking at me! So cute!

I couldn't stop taking pictures of them! So cute!

The fact that they are small made it even more cute! My girl loved it!

I made 2 batch of mini cakes and there's still some batter left, so I tried to make bigger ones. Unfortunately I didn't have the proper cupcake casing, so the big ones were a little out of shape. But put them together and the result was another round of squealing and "aaaawwwwww soooo cute!!!" They were like a class of little ladybugs and teacher ladybugs, so it was perfect for the occasion!

OK, have to regain composure to continue.. The insides were quite nice and fluffy, but taste wise, it was quite ordinary. Like 鸡蛋糕. Maybe next time I make strawberry flavoured ones.

The cakes were a hit! At assembly the classmates gathered around my girl excitedly and exclaimed how cute the cakes were. My girl said that everybody loved it and I assumed it made her a very popular person that day. I was glad everybody had a good time and good memories for the last day of school.