Coconut Tapioca Cake—how to boil tapioca in a right way. 椰汁抹茶西米糕

I found a recipe from Thailand using coconut cream and tapioca. I have an extreme love for coconut and all the derivatives, such as coconut candy I used to buy from southeast Asia, or the unsweetened fine shredded coconut. It’s hard to find finely shredded coconut here, and all I see are the big coconut flakes and they are way too sweet. I admire the sugar acceptance of Americans though!

The arrival of my package from NUTS.COM gave me the motivation to try this recipe because I bought big-size tapioca and matcha green tea powder. This is the first time I bought cooking stuff from NUTS.COM and I actually would like to recommend to people. The variety is amazing, the delivery speed is great and the material is packed in cute zipper bags! I recommended it to one of my labmates who loves snacks since this websites also has so many to choose from. OK. Too much for this website…and I am not advertising for them. Just want to share—-typical Gemini personality 🙂

I read this recipe from a Chinese blogger’s space and she said she found it during her trip in Thailand. Anyway, I modified her recipe by adding 2% reduced milk to the coconut cream, and also mix some matcha green tea powder to obtain tea flavor and color. The blogger herself only used coconut cream, so the cake looks purely white.

RECIPE:

200mL coconut cream
100mL milk
40g tapioca (both large size and small size)
An envelope gelatin powder (7g)
35g sugar
1.5 tbsp matcha green tea powder

1. Boil tapioca till transparent. Drain and wash by cold water twice and drain again.
2. Add coconut cream, milk, 30g sugar, and gelatin into a medium sauce pan. Stir and heat at around low to medium level. Keep stiring until sugar and gelatin are dissolved. Add matcha green tea powder slowly and stir quickly.
3. Spread washed and drained tapioca at the bottom of mold and sprinkle another 10g sugar onto it. Mix to average the flavor. Then pour the coconut milk mixture into the mold to desired height.
4. Cool at room temperature for 0.5h and then put into fridge. Around 5 hours later, the cake will be solidified.

TIPS:

1. The molds I chose were two glasses and a pyrex food container. You can choose whatever you like, plastic or glass, etc.
2. I used both large and small sized tapioca because they have different taste after boiling. The larger ones have a more elastic taste while the small ones tend to aggregate. Note that larger ones need more time to be fully cooked (I mean transparent), but I did cook them together. It’s not a big deal. Also the larger one could leave a nice morphology when you cut the cake into pieces.
3. The best way to boil tapioca, described by the blogger and tried by myself, is a combination of several steps. (a) Use a small sauce pan and put enough water at first. When the water is boiling, stop heating and pour tapioca in, wait 10 min with the lid covered. (b) Then turn high heat on, when the water is boiling again, turn to low heat for 2 min, and stop heating to wait for another 5min with the lid on. (c) Now the tapioca should be transparent mostly except the center part. At last, repeat (b) until it is transparent all over. You must stir occasionally during this process to prevent them from sticking to the pan. To make this clear, the reason we don’t cook tapicoa using long high heat is that it will lose the elastic taste and become glue-like stuff.

I think it’s a little bit tricky to cut nice edges out of the mold. In addition, the flavor of coconut is stronger than the matcha green tea’s. So I sifted some green tea powder on the cake. That tastes really fantastic.

OK. Wish everyone a nice weekend.

Reference:http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5d8e62e00100jqyr.html