Anpan

Did I mention that I got a KitchenAid for my birthday? I am in love with it. I think it may have changed my life. It is, at the very least, changing my waist size. In the last two weeks I've used it to make banana bread, Cha Siu Bao (Chinese steamed pork buns), chocolate chip cookies, Zopf bread (a Swiss brioche-like braided bread), marshmallows, and the cuties you see above: anpans. Anpans are Japanese snacks/dessert with red bean paste in the middle of a sweet bun. When I taught English in Japan eons ago, I remember how so many of my students would munch on anpans or other sweet buns filled with custard or curry or melon flavoring (which I always thought was a little gross) for lunch.

The ones I made weren't quite as fluffy nor were they as large, but they brought back sweet memories of living in the middle of a rice field, navigating a culture that was at once mine and not mine and teaching hundreds of Japanese youth how to speak with a Los Angeles accent (I seem to recall that there was a superfluous amount of "like" sprinkled into my students' English sentences). My next challenge is mochi ice cream...I wonder if the KitchenAid can handle it?