Still Feeling Peckish

  
So I do confess that despite my grumbling about all the tedious visiting we have to do for Chinese New Year, I have a sneaking liking for the festival’s non-stop feasting because that takes away half the conversation I need to make. The other up side is that it gives me a fantastic excuse to cook and bake. Reunion dinner is usually held at my parents’ place and my mom has been kind enough to let me add my experiments into the food line-up.

It’s really funny how family gatherings have evolved over the years. Back in the day when my grandparents were still around, I remember braised pig trotters being part of the menu for reunion dinner at their place in Johor Bahru. This memory was carved in my memory, mainly because I had such a huge aversion to the fatty pieces of pork floating in greasy gravy. As a young child, the event we kids all looked forward to was the ice-cream truck tinkling its way around the neighborhood. This was no ordinary ice cream truck as the driver would also sell other snacks and toys from the back of his truck. When night fell, we would get progressively more excited as we were allowed to light the fireworks and sparklers we had bought from the “ice cream uncle”.

Fast forward 3 decades later our kids have now taken over the fun scene at our reunion dinners. But they do so, armed not with sparklers but with their mobile devices. Their games are more complex than ours but probably not as effective as ours in working up an appetite for sumptuous meal laid up for us. Chinese New Year Reunion Dinner is probably one of the most important occasions in the Chinese calendar, probably equivalent to the American Thanksgiving meal. To give an idea of the scale that this is celebrated, this year, in China, 330 million train tickets and 55 million plane tickets have been sold to get mainland Chinese back to their homes in the provinces. As an overseas Chinese whose grandparents left China many decades ago, I am spared from that kind of traveling but am no less bound by culture and obligation to turn up at all our family gatherings. According to tradition, Chinese must return to their ancestral homes before 12 midnight on the eve of the lunar new year. This year was the absolute first time I have not been on call for the past 10 years and I confess I was sorely tempted to break with tradition and fly somewhere for a short break. But I think it would have caused a mini scandal among my extended family members and in the end we settled on staying in Singapore and plodding through the festivities. 

The silver lining of staying in Singapore for the CNY holidays is that I get to cook. I usually host Christmas dinner at my place, but CNY celebrations are purely the domain of the elders. Both my mother and one of my aunts usually anchor the cooking for reunion dinner, but I get to slide a couple of dishes in sideways. This year, as a nod to one of the icons of CNY, I decided to make poke cake from Mandarin oranges, as a nod to one of the staples of the season.

Mandarin oranges are exchanged when visiting homes during the season. I had never fully comprehended the sheer number of varieties of mandarin oranges there were until this year. My cousin F was kind enough to offer to help me to by a large box of mandarin oranges from the fruit wholesalers. But when she was trying to pin me down on which kind of oranges I wanted to buy, I was completely lost as I was unfamiliar with the varietals available. Anyway a quick and dirty search on Google turned up a Straits Times article on mandarin orange varieties and I finally settled on the Lukan oranges which are sweet and easy to peel. But then having bought a box of 36 I realized then that I would have to make a bunch of desserts as the kids don’t usually eat them.

Recently I had discovered poke cake as well, and Carolyn Ketchum’s coconut cream poke cake (All Day I Dream About Food) is probably one of the best low carb cake recipes that I have ever come across. She also had a recipe on slow cooker lemon poke cake and in the end I used a mish-mash of her 2 recipes to make my Mandarin orange poke cake. Needless to say, the result was sheer awesomeness. The orange jello soaked through the almond meal cake and made it really orangey and moist. I will swear allegiance forever to this woman because last week I had tried another low carb food blogger’s orange cake which was a dense and dry failure. 

So here is the Mandarin orange cake recipe – it does take more steps than the usual cake but the end result is truly worth it.

  
From the top left in clockwise direction: orange cake soaked with orange jello; cake with whipped cream icing; final result with toasted coconut flakes and sliced mandarin orange peel for decoration.