It's always greener on the other side

Thanks to a beary insistent relation of mine, a whole family of tubby, furry little green globs were created at 12a.m. last night. You know who you are.

The icing on the onde-onde was that pandan leaves are not readily available in good ol' Aussie as opposed to in Malaysia. And at that hour no less. So we ended up having to cheat a little with pandan flavouring and a mixture of blue and yellow food colouring. Which made our onde seriously GREEN. Think the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz kinda green.


But otherwise, our creations were pretty authentic. We had a wee bit of trouble with the shapes of some of our onde but given it was 12a.m., who really cares? Seriously though, expect to have a lot of mishapen ondes along the way. It takes a while to master the technique of making a non-leaking onde-onde.

Some of the sorry mishaps of our attempt

The Beast and Beauty

For the uniniated, who are no doubt tremendously confused right now, onde-onde is a Malaysian sweet meat made of glutinous rice flour with a beautiful gula melaka filling. 'Beautiful' because when you take a bit out of it, the filling literally explodes in your mouth. Mmmm...

Onde-onde

Ingredients
Outer layer
500 gm glutinous rice flour
3 pandan leaves
(alternatively: pandan flavouring and green food colouring)
100 gm dessicated coconut
½ cup water at room temperature
1 pot of boiling water

Filling
⅓ cup gula melaka shavings (palm sugar)

½ cup brown sugar
mixed together evenly

Method

1. Blend pandan leaves with the room temperature water.
2. Add the water to the rice flour and knead the mixture by hand till it just becomes a dough. The consistency of the dough should be easily shapeable and not too dry. A rough guide would be when the dough can be first kneaded without sticking to your palms. For example, the picture here shows what your dough should NOT look like.
   
3. Pinch out some of the dough, enough to roll a 2 cm diameter ball.
4. With your thumb, make an indentation in the middle of the ball and pack some of the fillings into it.
   
5. Pinch the top of the outer layer of the onde to reseal it, leaving the filling inside. Roll it gently into a ball once again.
6. Drop the onde into a pot of boiling water
7. When the onde floats to the surface of the water, scoop it out and roll it in a bowl containing the dessicated coconut.
8. Allow to cool at least 10 minutes before eating to avoid scalded tongues.

Just as a note, each onde-onde should be eaten whole because they tend to squirt when chewed on. Enjoy!