Sun Pastry 太陽餅

I really don't know what these are called in English or how to properly translate the name into English, so I went for a semi-literal translation. When my uncle and his colleague Peter visited a couple of weeks back, Peter brought us a box of 太陽餅. My dad shared half of the box with my aunt, and ate about 70% of the rests, even the non-vegetarian ones. Imagine the shock on his face when I told him the non-vegetarian ones were probably made of port fat. My mom ate about 3 and I only ate one myself and was pretty mad at him for eating the rest. To satisfy my craving, I decided to look up the recipe and make them myself!

Sun Pastry 太陽餅 

(recipe from 美食美景紐西蘭美女的家)

Fillings:  (10 parts)
Meltose sugar 30g
Powdered sugar  100g
Butter 30 g (room temp)
Powdered milk  15g
Water 1 tablespoon

Mix all the ingredient together. It's going to be very sticky, so you can put it in the fridge for about 30 minutes for easier handling. Divide the filling into 10 and roll into balls. I thought there was too much filling in each of the pastry, so I would cut the filling down to 70% next time.

This type of Taiwanese pastry dessert are flaky and a bit similar to puff pastry, except it doesn't really puff up. But the concept is similar to rolling butter into dough when you make puff pastry. You need two parts of doughs.

Outer Dough 油酥皮 
All-purpose flour 150g
Butter 60 g (room temp)
Sugar 1 tablespoon
Water 1/4 cup

Mix together the ingredient until a shiny dough is formed. You want to cover the dough up with plastic wrap so it doesn't dry up while you prepare other ingredients. Divide the dough into 10 parts.

Inner Dough 油酥
Cake flour 100g
Butter 60-65g (room temp)

Mix together and form a dough. Divide the dough into 10 parts. 


Direction:

1. Roll the outer dough out just big enough to wrap entirely over a inner dough ball.
2. close at the top, flatten the ball with your palm and roll it up and down (not left and right). 
3. with your hand roll and close up the dough.
4. turn the rolled up dough 90degree, and roll up and down again. 
5. pull together opposite end of the dough and try to form a ball. 
6. roll out dough again big enough to wrap entirely around the filling ball.
7. close tight and roll flat the ball. 
8. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes. 

I'm pretty sure my instruction makes absolutely no sense, so try to make sense of it yourself by looking at the pictures below. Pictures are taken from Carol's blog. 

 

You want to flatten out the ball from the very last picture above for this particular pastry.

I had a few problems with exploding filings in ones that I didn't close tight enough, but otherwise it was a very successful first try. They tasted like the real ones!