Kiong Hei Huat Tsai!

Happy Chinese New Year to all!

One of the popular fare that we, Chinese prepare during this festive event is the Tikoy or sweet cake. In fookien, we call it Ti Keh. It's basically made from ground glutenous rice, sugar, flavoring and some liquid (water, juice or milk). From this, others add additional flavoring and coloring like Ube/purple, Pandan/green, Brown Rice/beige, and Strawberry/pink. Heck, I even saw one in Coffee flavor. It's mixed together to form a smooth sticky paste mixture then steamed, cooled down, sliced and fried with egg or flour.

This year I'm preparing the Ube variant. They say purple tikoy is lucky this year. So as green. No, I don't make this from scratch because it's too laborious for me as you know I'm tamad. Besides, there are lots of tikoy in the market which are just as good and organic and they come in beautiful packaging ready for giving. I got one as a gift this year and they say it's auspicious if you receive one. If you don't, buy one yourself. It's also a good luck if you eat some during the new year.

The center, Fu, which is also happens to be my son's Chinese name means good luck, good fortune or blessing.

Sweet, sticky and round. As the name connotes, sweet for happiness, sticky so you and your loved ones stick together as family, and round for wealth.

I prepared it in 2 ways.

Slice the tikoy in half, then slice vertically like dominoes.

This is with beaten egg.

Fried with a little oil only. I got a little overboard with this one so I ended up with oily tikoys.

The other one with flour.

After frying, the outside becomes crispy and the inside sticky.

The top part is the egg mixture and the bottom, flour.