Chinese New Year Cookies

I finally made one of those Chinese New Year must have...Kueh Bangkit. These are biscuits made with tapioca flour and coconut milk. The tapioca flour has to be fried with pandan leaves before it can be used. This is one of the main reasons that I have been putting off the idea to make them. With my sub-standard stir-frying skills, I may over fry the flour and very likely spatter flour all over the kitchen.

The other problem is, there are too many different recipes to choose from. It would be difficult to choose one which would yield the best result...crispy and yet melt-in-the mouth. Even with the same recipe, different people may achieve different results. If you are unlucky, you may even end up with trays of rock-hard cookies!

By chance, I came upon this recipe that does not require the tapioca flour to be pan-fried, it can be done by heating in a convection or a microwave oven. I guess the main purpose of frying the flour is to get rid of the moisture and add fragrance with the pandan leaves. With moisture eliminated from the flour, the biscuits will turn out very crispy. With the assurance that I will unlikely get flour all over the place, I went ahead with the recipe. I "bake" the flour the night before and cool them overnight. Making the dough was rather straight forward. The only difficult part was rolling out the dough as it was rather dry and hard. I had to roll the dough with a piece of parchment paper covered on it to prevent it from sticking to the rolling pin. My younger boy volunteered his assistance and we had a fun time cutting out the biscuits. I left him to finish up the last tray while I cleaned up the mess. He really did a good job! The biscuits turn out to be very nice and crispy. However, I could hardly tell whether they are really good, as the last time I had these biscuits was a year ago.