So maybe we're a rare breed, the people who dream of making tau sar pneah. And maybe rarer still, the ones who actually reach for it, but Google would show you more than a handful of food/baking bloggers who have.
I'm neither food blogger nor baking blogger -- and there are frequently times when I can't be referred to as a blogger at all, times when my life is so busy being lived that it won't sit, stay and be documented for public consumption -- but here's my experience of it.
But first. Remember a few months ago, when I posted that
tribute to the superlative breed of friends I have? I could add another point of thanksgiving here: For giving me company to make these labour-intensive biscuits with. On my own, it would have taken me at least another year to give them a try and even then, would have been weeping from the monotony and fatigue by the time I reached for the 50th lump of dough. (For anyone who's keeping track of these things: the recipe is supposed to yield 100 biscuits. We made 88.)
I arrived after church, after the doughs and filling had been prepared. This meant I was just in time to sit down to a quick lunch before the assembly began: first the weighing and the rolling into little spheres of the filling,
the oil dough,
the water dough.
Then the
rolling and combining and rolling and rolling and rolling of the two
doughs (not pictured, because by then it was all hands on deck and
nobody had a non-oily hand for taking pictures with).
Then the egg wash and the baking,
and the laying neatly in rows for cooling and being admired and attracting longing gazes and finally
the being bitten into; the collapsing into layers of light, thin flakes; the revealing of crumbly-soft seasoned mung bean; the bringing of childhood memories and adolescent reminiscences and early adulthood nostalgia into present day.
It's nice, the feeling you get when dreams come true.
