This week has been crazy busy.
Work has ramped up and I went from 1 to 5 projects so fast that it’s just a little weird when I leave at the end of the day still with urgent matters to deal with the next day.

More than that though, my time has been eaten up in preparing for Chinese New year – I’ve been experiment with foods so that I can bring some home to my family (Look mom! I made them!) and share them with friends when I come back to throw a party.

The Glutinous Sesame ball is one of my all time favourites.
Chewy and exploding with the flavour of roasted black sesame, it’s one of those foods that taste best straight out of the kitchen while it’s still warm enough to melt on your tongue. You can imagine how excited I was when I was able to eat these hot out of the pot.

Fair Warning: Do not eat these right before going to the dentist. That black sesame really does get all over your teeth.

Recipe: Glutinous Sesame ball
Adapted from bigboldbeautifulfood.blogspot.com

Dough

1 cup Glutinous rice flour （糯米粉）
2/3 cup Hot water
2/3 cup Brown sugar
(This makes about 10 sesame balls)

Melt the brown sugar in the hot water, then pour the liquid into the flour slowly in increments to make sure the dough is not too wet. Stir until the dough comes together smoothly and not too sticky.

Filling
I made two kinds of fillings: black sesame (芝麻）and peanut （花生）.

To make black sesame filling, roast the black sesame in a pan until it starts smelling like popcorn. Then, use your food processor or blender or some muscle to grind it up into powdery paste. Melt together a 1:1:1 ratio of black sesame to butter to sugar. (You can adjust based on your taste. Butter adds to the smoothness of the filling, sugar to the sweetness, black sesame to the texture and smell.)

To make peanut filling, simply grind up the peanuts into a powdery paste. Melt together a 1:1:1 ratio of peanut to butter to sugar.

Chill in the fridge. Don’t use the filling if it’s not solid or solidy. Seriously.

Assembling it all together

I definitely found this to be the hardest part but persevere! It’s worth it.

Pinch off a piece of dough – the smaller, the harder it is to fill – and make an imprint in the dough with your thumb. It shouldn’t stick to your fingers.

Fill the imprint with your filling. Here I used the peanut. Notice that the peanut filling is in a solid form NOT liquid. Believe me, you’ll be crying later on if it were liquid.

Surround the filling with the dough and form into a sphere. You might have to roll it between your palms a bit, you might have to repair some crack with a smidgen of water, you might have to press some edges together…just do it somehow.

Then wet it with water and roll it in some raw white sesame seeds. Press the sesame seeds into the ball lightly so that it’ll stick even when cooked.

Deep fry those babies until golden brown! To help them expand and retain a round spherical shape, while deep frying, press the balls against the side of the pot every so often. As you can tell in the picture below, I didn’t do it for all sides evenly so they’re a bit lopsided. But they definitely expanded from when they were raw to when they were cooked.

Mmm. Take a bite. Just look at that gooey filling. Then finish it off while it’s still hot.