So Adrian was really kind to invite us over to his place for a new year dinner at the beginning of this month.  His instruction was "bring dessert" so I simply googled "chinese desserts" and Lo and Behold! it wasn't "aw nee", nor was it "cheng teng", certainly not "mango custard" that popped up but..... P.E.K.I.N.G  D.U.S.T.  For a moment I thought it was an ang moh representation of pork floss or something.  If it was, then it would been a gross mis-representation.  But subsequent clicks later, I discovered to my horror that I had all along been ignorant of an apparently chinese dessert called Peking Dust that made it to Google's no.1 find.

I, still dazed that I've never heard of a thing called Peking Dust, dutifully followed the recipe found here.  How I did the glazed walnuts was simple to melt a quarter cup of sugar in a pan with a few spoons of water.  Keep on medium low heat till the sugar has caramelised to a brown syrup then add in broken walnut pieces.  Once coated, remove the walnuts to dry on non-stick baking paper.  For the chestnuts a.k.a "The Dust", don't follow all that complicated steps involving fresh chestnuts.  All I did was to buy the cooked and ready-to-snack chestnuts from NTUC.

So just blitz them in the food processor and voila.  To serve 8 as stated in the recipe, I suggest about 300g of chestnuts will do.  I ended with way too much leftovers.  But be generous in handing out the 'dust', the cream really does taste better with lots of chestnuts.  When whipping your cream, I suggest using an electric mixer, the cream mixes much better and you don't get an arm cramp.  Use a large bowl also and keep your mixer upright so you don't get creamed walls.   Add in your castor sugar bit by bit.  The final consistency should be something like cake frosting cream.  If desired, you could add in some real vanilla beans.  By the ay, the mixture that you would have created is also known as creme chantilly and there are countless recipes online to spruce up creme chantilly.  If you really cannot get chestnuts, I think some digestive biscuits scrunched up to little bits in a plastic bag would do pretty well too.  Just toast your digestive dust very lightly to hardened it up a bit and add a bit more flavour.

 So here I am preparing bowlfuls of Peking Dust after a great sausage and salad dinner.  Best served extremely cold.  I used a bit of mixed fruit too to give it some colour and extra flavour.  I had mixed in some vanilla flavour into the chestnuts.  I do think vanilla complements the dish really well.  This isn't something people are really prepared to eat though.  I did have a few rejects which was kinda sad cos a lot of effort went into this.  So make sure your culimnary audience is the cream-liking sort.  The final product is something like a ice cream, just not frozen.  Don't be afraid to pile on the 'dust' and mix everything up well before eating.  I was a bit tentative eating it at first too, but it kinda grew on me especially the blending of the cream and the chestnuts which I really liked.  So here's an appropriate one to our chinese heritage based on our Peking Dust, however angmoh-fied it might be: 金银满屋 in this Year of the Ox.