Sesame nightmare

Don't try this at home, unless your objective is to punish your other half by making him/her make this.

I found this Black Sesame Paste dessert recipe in my Cantonese cookbook and was very motivated to try it out myself.

Alas, the short description of the steps to making the sesame paste much underestimated the tediousness of the process, especially if one doesn't own a proper blender.

To achieve a supposedly smooth and watery sesame paste, one has to first stir fry the sesame seeds, grind them in a blender, sieve out the shells in a metal sieve, then sieve again through a muslin cloth.

Well, this is simply too tedious. From a full bowl of sesame seeds, I reckon the amount of paste left after the first sieve reduced my paste to less than half. Thankfully, I don't have a muslin cloth and conveniently skipped the 2nd sieve, proceeding on to cooking the paste. And also thankfully, Remi came to my rescue and helped me with blending the seeds with our hand blender, sieving the paste and cooking it.

Everything about the recipe is just wrong, and the resulting taste is also far from perfect. For so much work, I'd rather pay S$2.50 for my tasty bowl of black sesame paste. There's this very nice dessert shop named 记得吃 opposite Chinatown Point, along Upper Cross Street in Chinatown. Their steamed milk is also very good. Hmmmm....I'm missing all my favourite deserts...like mango desert with pomelo, almond paste, walnut paste, peanut soup with dumplings...