Chinese wormwood cake which belongs to HuaiYang Cuisine is a traditional snack for Qingming Festival in China. Chinese people sweep the tombs to mourn their ancestors on this day, so the Qingming Festival is also called the Sweeping Tomb Day. At the Tang Dynasty, the wormwood cake appeared as a tribute to sacrificial offerings. Later, every household in the Jiangnan area steamed and ate wormwood cake on the Qingming Festival.
From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, wormwood leaves are warm food, menstrual women can eat it to dispel cold and relieve pain, and external use can relieve dampness and relieve itching. Wormwood has a history of preventing plagues for thousands of years. Pharmacological studies of modern medicine have shown that Wormwood is a broad-spectrum antibacterial and antiviral drug, which has inhibitory and killing effects on many viruses and bacteria.
The fresh wormwood leaves with a light fragrance give this dessert the soul. Some people say that eating Qingtuan with green color is to taste the spring. The ingredients are not complicated, as long as the wormwood leaves, glutinous rice flour, starch, water, and my favorite red bean paste, there will be delicious wormwood cakes.
We need to wash the wormwood, blanch it, whipped it into juice with a blender, add glutinous rice flour, starch, a small amount of water, and then steam it in the pot. The steamed dough is very sticky, need to add some flour and oil when make the green dough wrappers.
Notes:
After steaming the green dough, let it stand in steamer for a while to aviod being air dried. When makeing cakes, add some oil and flour, they will not stick to hands and word board.
Chinese Wormwood Cake with Adzuki Bean Paste
Equipment
- Blender
Ingredients
- 150 gram Glutinous rice flour
- 40 gram corn starch
- 150 gram wormwood juice
- 300 gram sweet red bean paste
- 2 tablespoon oil
- 50 ml water added in dough
Instructions
- Wash the fresh wormwood leaves, blaching them, add them and some water to the blender, juiced
- Add the glutinous rice flour, starch, juice of warmwood to a big bowl, adding water slowly when stirring them until Until they become mushy
- Transfer to a steamer, steaming them for about 20 minutes, turn off the fire. let it stand in the steamer.
- Cool the temprature that it’s not hot to your hands, add 2 tabelspoon oil and some flour as long as it's not sticky，make them into wrappers,
- Make the red bean paste fillings into balls too, let one red bean paste ball be on every wrapper, finished the cakes
- Serve immediately.
