Lunar New Year puddings: 2018 hodgepodge

Having been banished from Taipei this lunar new year season, I actually haven't gotten around to buying a single traditional pudding for the holidays.  Thankfully I still ended up with a few different puddings in the fridge, so the first few days of the year of the dog was spent nibbling on these fatty (and sometimes sticky) blocks...

Hello Kitty decided to buy a trio of puddings from our friend KC.  These are from a "6-hands" collaboration between Fancook Productions (明廚料理教室), Tak Lung (得龍大飯店), and Hafie (哈妃).  So on new year's day, this is what we had for breakfast...

Radish pudding with Japanese daikon and preserved meats (日本大根臘味蘿蔔糕), from Fancook - this isn't my first time having the radish pudding from Fancook, but somehow this wasn't as enjoyable as what I remembered from last year.  The pudding seemed a little more solid in terms of texture.

Taro pudding with preserved meats (極品臘味芋頭糕), from Fancook - under normal circumstances, I can only take so much taro before I lose interest, so this isn't something I would normally get.

New year pudding with ginger and Okinawan muscovado (薑汁沖繩黑糖年糕), from Fancook - pretty decent, but not surprising to find the ginger overpowering the muscovado.

On the second day of the new year, we went to visit My Birdbrain Cousin and my nephew Wolfie.  More pudding!  This time I brought along the beautiful box sent to me by my favorite Cantonese restaurant - The 8 (8餐廳) in the Grand Lisboa Macau.

Premium cane sugar cake with bird's nest and coconut juice (燕液椰汁年糕), from The 8 - YASSSS!!!! Gold foil!  My favorite ingredient!!!

I do have to say, though, that I really liked this.  There was a good amount of coconut flavor, and the addition of bird's nest meant that overall it was a little less sweet.  Texture-wise it was also pretty good and didn't melt too much after frying.

Turnip pudding with French morel mushrooms (法國牛肝菌蘿蔔糕), from Dashijie (大師姐) - My Birdbrain Cousin bought this pretty late in the game, so this was what was left on the shelves. It was obvious from the packaging that there was a lot of oil...

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that My Birdbrain Cousin does not own a frying pan or a wok... so we ended up frying the pudding in one of her cast iron Staub pots... with olive oil, no less.  This turned the pieces of pudding into mush... not the texture you'd want.  But I have to admit that this was pretty tasty.

We ended up steaming half the block, and that seemed to work better... as the texture became pretty close to what we would expect from steamed pudding.