Ingredients (makes roughly 32):

Skin (饼皮)

• Flour (面粉), 150g
• Vegetable oil (植物油), 70g
• Water (水), 70g (begin with slightly less)
• 1 egg (鸡蛋)

Pastry (酥油)

• Flour (面粉), 150g
• Vegetable oil (植物油), 70g

Filling (馅料)

• Gourd / red bean paste (冬瓜容/红豆容), 70g

OR, if making your own red bean / mung bean paste:

• Approximately 2 dl of red beans and/or mung beans
• Sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix the ingredients for the skin, adding the water last to ensure that the dough is smooth and easy to work with but doesn’t have too much liquid. Divide into smaller balls of dough, roughly 32 in total.

2. Mix the ingredients for the pastry, and divide into smaller balls of dough, the same number as for the skin (which should give you portions that are slightly smaller than the portions for the skin).

3. Prepare the filling, either by buying gourd / red bean paste, or by making your own filling. I made red bean and mung bean paste for mine (see recipe below), and a type of glutinous rice paste is also occasionally used. Divide into portions, same number of portions for the skin and pastry and roughly the same size.

4. Blend the skin and pastry by first wrapping the skin around the pastry, and then folding and re-folding to create many thin layers inside the dough. See this video, starting at around 9.30, for a demonstration of how this can be done.

5. Wrap the blended dough around the filling, and flatten slightly. The chef in the video I’ve linked to above flattens them quite a lot, while the Wing Wah chef’s only flattened the dough slightly.

6. Place the cakes on a baking tray and brush with beaten egg. Let the egg dry, and then brush once more.

7. Bake at 180°C for 15-20 minutes, until the cakes are golden brown.

To make your own red bean or mung bean filling：

1. Let the beans soak in water overnight.

2. Rinse beans, cover with fresh water, and bring to boil on the stove. Reduce to a simmer, and let simmer for 1-2 hours. Skim off the white foam that rises to the top (mainly for the mung beans).

3. The beans are ready once they can easily be crushed with a fork or spatula. Remove from the stove, but keep some of the water that the beans were boiled in.

4. Peel the mung beans (the red beans do not need to be peeled). This is the most time-consuming step, and I’m not sure if it can be skipped – if you don’t have the patience for this step, stick to just red bean paste. One tactic that some people use is to bring the beans to a boil once again and skim off the skins that float to the surface. However, I found that most of the beans still needed to be peeled by hand.

5. Add sugar to taste (I used roughly 0.5 dl white caster sugar), and fry the paste with a small amount of oil until it is smooth and has the right consistency. It may be useful at this stage to add in a small amount of the water that the beans were boiled in.

6. Once the paste has been prepared, it can be kept refrigerated for roughly one week.

Beans soaking overnight

Dough split into portions and ready to be rolled into wife cakes

Finished wife cakes! Slightly higher dough to filling ratio than would be ideal, but still delicious

This is one of those cases that makes it so frustrating to be a human being – an injustice that is obvious and uncomplicated, that the whole world knows about, and still we’re completely powerless to do anything about it.

Although in the most recent twist to the story, it seems that some party-affiliated newspapers are now criticizing the local authorities that have put the famous barefoot lawyer in illegal house-arrest — which might be the first step towards blaming the whole incident on incompetent local officials, deflecting blame away from the system and central government that has failed to ensure protection under the law.

As the Swedish radio channel went through the usual summary of reactions around the world, an unexpected one popped up – congratulations from the Tranströmer Cafe in Kunming, China (which is a part of a Scandinavian-Chinese cross-cultural arts centre called the TCG Nordica). We visited it when we were in Kunming last year – there was an exhibition opening in the gallery space, and it’s always nice to be able to find a cafe in China with authentic Swedish coffee and kanelbullar – but didn’t realise how foresightful the Swedish and Chinese co-owners had been in naming the cafe. In an interview with Tranströmer’s Chinese translator, Li Li, he talks (in Swedish) about why Tranströmer is popular in China, which he ascribes partly to similarities between Tranströmer’s style with the sparse style of traditional Chinese poetry – he calls Tranströmer a modern Tang dynasty poet (full article, again in Swedish, here).

These somewhat absurd animations of the news are actually quite interesting in terms of how they summarise the main points in the top news stories (which are often somewhat absurd in themselves to begin with). See here for some more info on where they come from.

This recent New York Times article sums it up best (and this article gives a more tongue-in-cheek summary of the same problem). The New York Times claims that China’s large foreign currency reserves and high rates of household savings means that the economy is unlikely to see a full crash just yet, but eventually Japan-style stagnation is a big risk. Part of the problem is that local leaders are evaluated and promoted based on whether or not they reach certain short-term goals, the most important being economic development — and so incentives are in favour of making big investments that look good on short-term balance sheets but might not pay off in the long-term. The west likes to think of China’s central government as a well-oiled machine of highly skilled technocrats, but in fact they have less control over what happens on a local and provincial level than they’d like to project.

Young university graduates already have to fight to find jobs — what the situation would look like after a crash makes me very worried.

From the New York Times

My favourite picture from the collection is this one: