Ondeh-ondeh-day!

By Esther Rachel Lai. - 1/04/2014

On boxing day, my dad asked us to join him in making Ondeh-ondehs. Ondeh-ondehs are basically pandan & sweet potato balls that oozes a really sweet brown syrup known as gula-melaka when you bite into them. We referred to a couple of youtube videos for the recipe, I've shared the videos at the bottom of this entry!

To give the ondeh-ondeh it's pandan fragrance and deep green colour, we used natural pandan extract. I guess you can also use artificial pandan essence and food colouring but I doubt it'll taste as good! The videos don't show how to extract the natural essence from the pandan leaves but we'll show you how in the pictures below!

So first of all, you have to cut the leaves into smaller pieces...

This is so that it'll blend easily when you put it in the blender (: You might need to add a little water if you think it's too dry to extract any essence out but just a little! You don't want to dilute it too much such that it loses it's flavour!

What you get is a green mush..

Then using a sift, extract the essence by squeezing the blended leaves against the sift, allowing the liquid to flow through the sift & leaving the dried pandan residue behind.

& there you have it! Natural green colouring & flavour!

I won't elaborate much on how to make ondeh-ondeh because you can simply view the videos at the end of this post but here's Kylie showing you some of the ingredients you need!

This is Gula-Melaka, you'd have to chop it up to smaller pieces and wrap them up with the dough (which you can see later) unless you're intending to make a gigantic ball of ondeh-ondeh.

We took 2 attempts to make our ondeh-ondeh, the first using tapioca starch and the second, using sweet potatoes (the traditional way) instead. Both work just fine!