Malaysian Monday 98 : Cornflake cookies and Lunar New Year celebrations

   Hello friendsss. Wissshing all of you a happy and prosssperouss ssstart to the lunar New Year. In case the hissing hasn’t yet given it away, this is the year of the Snake according to the Chinese Zodiac.

 Snake lantern in Singapore's Chinatown

   The new year officially started on Sunday, but as I’ve mentioned before, celebrations last for 15 days so it’s not too late to wish your friends a Happy New Year. You could impress them even more by saying “Gong Xi Fa Cai”  ;).

Things have been pretty exciting round these parts in the lead up to the new year. Stalls selling all manner of clothes, decorations and food popped up in the local shopping area. Red decorations festooned buildings and every supermarket I walked into seemed to play the same upbeat new year music. (I’m not kidding about the repetitive music - the MCs had even picked up on it and would happily belt out the chorus, in Mandarin, when out and about.)

After being away from this part of the world for so long, it was wonderful to see the familiar new year treats start appearing around the neighbourhood. I no longer had to make my own “new year cake”, I simply had to pick some up at a local bakery!

The excitement became so infectious I even ended up baking some cookies although we don’t “officially” celebrate lunar new year in our household. These cornflake cookies were a very familiar treat when I was a kid. It didn’t just appear at New Year, it frequently made the rounds during the Hari Raya celebrations as well. In fact, when I went hunting for a recipe in mum’s handed down cookbooks, I found two! However, they both made enormous quantities of cookies and as we weren’t expecting any visitors, I searched the net for more manageable ratios.






I found a simple recipe over at Aunty Cheah’s blog, No Frills Recipes. Her recipe still makes  quite a lot so I divided the recipe and made 2/3 of the given measurements. This solved the problem of measuring out one and a half eggs too (I just used 1 egg). I also removed 1 oz of plain flour from my 2/3 measurements and replaced this with 1 oz of cornflour instead. This ingredient was mentioned in one of mum’s recipes. The cookies seemed to keep crisp for a long time and I think the cornflour helped.







Hope you’re all enjoying your week wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. I’ll leave you with some photos of our visit to Chinatown.

 Market stalls in Chinatown

 MC Senior contemplates sparklers at a stall




See you soon!