Still Feeling Peckish

It’s rolled around to that time of the year again…Chinese New Year! Unlike last year, the lunar calendar has designated the holiday to fall in February which fortunately gives us a good breather after Christmas. I must say that I had a very busy but satisfying January and after finishing several new work and church initiatives I’m ready to take a brief hiatus and turn my attention to all things Chinese New Year.

Chinese New Year in Singapore has changed in some ways since I was a child. I remember waking up to breakfast where we were finally allowed to dig into several bottles of local snacks. We would savor these – sweet pineapple tarts, melt in the mouth kueh bangkit, crispy cylinders of love letters that we kids would pretend we were smoking Cubans and luscious tiny slices of sugee cake. CNY always had large family meals and as kids we would pile our plates and yet be able to run back and dip into our favorite snacks.

What has changed over the years is that most of these snacks in my childhood were homemade and gifted by powerful aunties and cooks who made it their signature flourishes in a season of gifting food. Now, most of these snacks flood the supermarkets and restaurants. There are a huge number of pop up stores offering these goodies and there is no shortage of sweet treats. What is sad however is that the large majority of these snacks don’t have the homemade quality. Machine-made still tastes pretty good, but not of my childhood memories.

There was a time when I was working in the US and discovered that all these iconic snacks that I grew up with were absent in the Chinese New Year celebrations there. I never realized that these were the product of a mish-mash Singapore-Malaysian culture where local Chinese and Malay food traditions resulted in a very different way of celebrating CNY. It was after I returned to Singapore that I started to attend baking classes and to make pineapple tarts and other local treats.

I’ve always been on the search for the best pineapple tart recipe. Pineapple tarts do need some skill as the tart bases are painstakingly pinched with a serrated edge tweezer to give a nest like look to the tart base that cradles the pineapple jam. Over the years I’ve learned specific tips and tricks – getting the best French butter to make the crumbly shortcrust tart base, hand shredding the pineapples (food processor chopping is not the same if you want a jam that has tiny strands of texture inside) and obsessively weighing out the pineapple jam for each tart because this gives an even product (this I learned from the endocrinology professor colleague who is a crazy good baker).

Things got even more challenging when I developed diabetes – for a few years CNY was challenging when I had to say no to a plethora of treats each time the holiday came around. But now I manage by making low carb versions of these holiday treats so I don’t feel deprived at all. The tricky treat recipe I’m going to share here is pineapple tarts because it’s been many years of trying to get a recipe that tastes exactly like the real thing so that nobody thinks they are getting a poor consolation version for the sugar intolerant.

I will say that this tart recipe is really possible only because of technology. I use Allulose which is a sugar substitute that does not crystallize like erythritol (it has saved my ice creams!). Secondly, I do ship in cake flour from LC foods – it is not gluten free but it only has 1.5g carbohydrates per 1/4 cup of flour. So each little tart probably has only 2-3 g carbs which is a win for me. Unfortunately in my part of the world, getting LC foods products is truly expensive because shipping from netrition is a killer. The bags I got were from a recent trip to the US where I shipped to a friend’s place. I wish there were better products – some years ago I wrote a post sharing a product from Indonesia but the consistency of product and availability is tricky (actually not reproducible) and the LC foods one seems to work better.

Anyway here is the recipe for pineapple tarts – the best version I have already. I’m not sure anybody else would make this recipe but it’s here to remind me that doing this is worth it as a gift to myself for the season!