A friend of mine recently told me, “my entire life I’ve had the awesomest of awesome moms to make Tang Yuan at Chinese New Year, but now I finally have to leave home and enter the real cooking world.” But, so far she’s as clueless as a panda on an ACDC concert on how to make tempting Tang Yuan.

Tang Yuan is easy and fun to make if you follow a very simple manual. And btw, there is no better way to impress your friends at Chinese New Year, than with some homemade tasteful Tang Yuan... Let’s make!

Step 1: Ingredients

Step 2: Making the Fillings

Add the sugar, butter and sesame seeds into a big bowl and mix them until the mixture has a paste-like consistency. I like adding half of the ingredients first and then mixing, and then adding the rest. This makes it easier to get rid of the butter clumps :)

Step 3: Forming the Fillings

Take the paste you made and form small balls out of them. The balls should be about 1 cm in diameter. If you like you can make them a little bigger if you want, it depends on how large you want the Tang Yuan to be. At best, put the balls on cling film them, as they stick to wood easily and it will make a mess.

Step 4: Making the Tang Yuan Dough

To make the dough, simply mix the rice flour with water. The dough should not be too watery, thus, if needed, add more flour to the mixture. The dough is best if you can make small balls out of it. Again, you can use your hands to mix the dough, this makes it quite easy.

Step 5: Forming the Tang Yuan

To form the actual, final Tang Yuan, take some dough and form it into a small plate. Then put one of the filling balls into the middle of it. Cover up the filling with dough. If the dough taken is not enough, add some more. Form the dough with filling into a ball. Now, the Tang Yuan should be quite sticky still. To solve that problem roll the ball in rice flour.

Step 6: Ginger Slices

Cut a few ginger slices.

Step 7: Almost Done...

Add rock sugar and the ginger slices into a pot of water. Heat the pot add a medium to high temperature. The water should be able to start boiling.

Step 8: Adding the Tang Yuan

Add the Tang Yuan into the boiling soup. Watch out to not burn yourselves when dropping the Tang Yuan.

Step 9: This Time, I Mean It. Almost Done.

Leave the Tang Yuan in the boiling sugar-ginger mixture until the Tang Yuan start floating. As soon as they do, they are ready. You can now take them out and serve.