Even though we’re not doing CNY, my mum has a whole stash of goodies all ready in her larder. Every year she makes all of this (multiply the number of bottles in this picture by about 10 and that’s about right) mainly for us to eat and some to be given to relatives and friends. So it usually takes us about half a year to finish everything she’s baked.
My mum is very methodical about her annual big bake. She plans weeks in advance when to take time off work and the all the baking is divided over a number of days over the weeks leading up to the new year. She buys butter and flour by the kilograms and cleans out Phoon Huat of pineapple jam. If my parents had been in the US on holiday in the last few months, she would have already bought her chocolate chips from Walmart.
She does great chocolate chip cookies, almond cookies and butter cookies but her pineapple tarts are the best.
I take very little credit for any of this because it’s not the usual fun experiment some other friends like audrey, popartgirl and sandy willingly indulge in in the kitchen. Before the actual baking, the mum tries to rope in as many people — my grandmother, the maids, my sister — to help roll the pineapple jam into tiny balls. These are then stored in ice cream tubs in a relatively cool part of the house. This speeds up the production line on the day itself so time isn’t wasted estimating and tearing apart the jam to be placed snugly in the dough cavity.
We usually get to eat the uglies but with my mum, there are no such specimens so we have to wait for leftovers that can’t fill an entire bottle. But this year since we’re not really celebrating the new year, we’ve already started eating everything.
So anyway every year I try and do as little as possible because it’s just so time consuming and I’m not really a baking person, if you know what I mean. This time I got away with just half a day of watching the oven to make sure the tarts are the exact shade of golden brown, letting them cool and counting how many go into each bottle. Yah she’s got little post-it strips on each bottle so she knows what her yield is from all the ingredients she uses for each batch.
I do feel guilty that I don’t help her out more but I think most mothers like experiencing the busy-ness and chaos that come with CNY preparations. I think they think of it as a privilege to work hard for such a joyous occasion. Thankfully it’s only once a year.
