[fake_plastic201]

This might be a big, too complicated question to ask >.< but I've often been making the recipe for manju lately. It's a sweet baked (Japanese) cookie-type thing - with a soft sugar cookie-like dough around a little bit of red bean curd. The recipe I normally use for the dough is very dense and thick tasting, and I think that they would be so much more enjoyable if the dough was lighter and more cake-like.

The dough is the only thing I'm worrying about now. It's is very similar to a not-very-sweet cookie in both taste and texture, and I really hope this recipe can be easily changed =)

Recipe:

3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 cup butter
1 1/4 cup white sugar
2 egg white, 1 egg yolk

about 1/4 cup milk


I usually just combine and sift the dry ingredients and cream the wet ingredients, and then mixing them together while adding in the milk. After wrapping the dough around the bean curd, I bake it at 350 degrees for between 20 and 23 minutes.

Thank you guys so much!

[KayW]

You might want to look into a recipe for steamed bean buns. These are blobs of dough wrapped around a bean paste filling (adzuki beans cooked down with sugar). The filling sounds different from yours, but the dough you might want to try. Once the buns are made they are steamed and the dough becomes light and fluffy on the inside with just a bit of a smooth elastic outside from the steam. The dough I use is this:

1/4 c. milk
2 tbsp water
1 1/2 tbsp oil
1 1/4 c. flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp. sugar

Mix the wet and dry in separate bowls and then slowly mix the wet into the dry until it forms a dough. Knead a couple of times until the dough is smooth and then refrigerate for an hour (I often skip the refrigeration and it still comes out good, just harder to work with). Then divide the dough, with bean buns this makes 8, fill, and cook in the steamer for 20 minutes. I LOVE the texture of this sweet steamed dough.