Taking a break from the recipe books, and in light of Lunar New Year, I decided to make Kue Nastar, the Indonesian version of pineapple tarts/cookies. The first time I tried this was earlier during the Christmas break after receiving some from a family friend. They were so good that I could have easily finished an entire batch by myself. It has always been on the back of my mind to try making this. Finally, I got the chance. I used this recipe.

Thus, in preparation for LNY, I ordered two cans of Wijsman Dutch butter. This was also an investment since this butter wasn’t exactly cheap and I wanted to make good use out of it.

I got started by buying a pineapple. I learned that you can tell when a pineapple is good if you smell the bottom of it and it smells like fresh pineapple. After picking up a good pineapple, I cut it down into chunks by first hacking off the top of the pineapple, then splitting it down the middle lengthwise, then into half again, to have four quarters. I then sliced down the cores off and separated out the fruit meat by cutting underneath the skin.

After cutting the pineapple into chunks, I pureed it in my blender with some water. Out of fear of turning it completely into pineapple slush, I avoided puree-ing it completely but in hindsight, I wish I had since I was going to strain out the liquid anyway and it made the jam stringy. After blending the chunks down to a puree, I strained out the juice.

I spent the next hour cooking this down. The pineapple puree slowly thickened, shrunk, and became jam. I was surprised how much it shrunk down from ~1.3 kg to close to ~220g. I mashed it a little bit more into paste form with some pineapple juice before shaping it into little balls and sticking it into the fridge.

The dough came next and was very straight forward in making. There was no stand mixer or food processor needed. I basically beat flour, egg yolk, butter, and sugar. It seemed very similar to the ingredients of the pastry crust that made, with the big difference being that there was no almond flour and the butter smelled a bit strong this time, almost like cheese.

After making and chilling the dough, I tried to be pretty precise with how much dough I was using per ball by measuring down by 7-8g with a scale so that each ball was the same weight. One tip that I learned is to wait for a little bit to let the dough come more to cold/RT so it is easier to form. Trying to shape chilled dough into balls was painful.

When it came to assembling the balls with the pineapple jam. I flattened each dough ball with my fingers before placing in a small sphere of pineapple jam. However, when trying to close it in, either the dough would crack or it would be too full because the dough balls were too small to really fit a small ball of pineapple jam. While I struggled with closing some of these cookies, I eventually decided to combine some dough balls together to be bigger (~11-12g) to fit the pineapple jam and it seemed to have work. After rolling in the pineapple jam into each dough ball and freezing them. they were baked.

The cookies were a tad bit overbaked, but they were good! The jam was a bit stringy (probably due to not pureeing it down enough) but it was good. I like the pineapple flavor a lot!

Bonus: Mom’s Dumplings

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of this but I also made dumplings for LNY, using my mom’s recipe. I’m going to just write this down here before I forget.

Ingredients for Mom’s Pork and Shrimp Dumplings:

• 1.5 lb of ground pork
• 12 21-23 ct jumbo shrimp, peeled, chopped finely
• 4 green onions, sliced
• 1/2 mid sized shredded cabbage, with some vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp chicken boullion
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp white pepper
• 1 tsp sesame oil (adds a nice special kick at the end)
• More salt than you think (at least more than 2-3 tbsp probably, just add enough until it makes you sort of nervous)
• 1 egg yolk
• 1.5 tbsp grated ginger

Cut and use the upper half of a medium sized napa cabbage (you want the leaves) and finely shred them by knife or food processor and drizzle some vegetable oil in and mix it in. In a separate big bowl, mash the pork and the egg yolk together thoroughly with hand. Then add shrimp and mash that in followed by mixing in sugar, boullion, soy sauce,. white pepper, grated ginger, salt (you add more to compensate for the cabbage). Then, toss in the onions, followed by the shredded cabbage until it’s well combined.

Spoon until a dumpling wrapper and boil/pan-fry as you like. Also makes for good pan-fried meatballs if you run out of wrappers.