Be it all prettily arranged on the table of a family feast/wedding, or simply packed in small plastic boxes fronting local Malay foodstalls, I always look forward to homemade Malay kuih (traditional delicacies). Sure, the Malay kuih, or kuih-muih in their plural form, are not exactly the healthiest, being almost always laden with guilt-inducing rich santan (coconut cream), heavily sweetened by the golden-brown blocks of gula Melaka (palm sugar), and alluringly fragranced by the many manifestations of daun pandan (screwpine leaves). But there is something most certainly enticing in colourful, single-serving desserts with a rich and chewy intricate texture, meticulously perfected generation after generation.
When I was growing up, I would often watch as my mother summon her kuih prowess and labour off on her own, doing her proverbial ‘thang’, so to speak. There are, however, the lucky times when she would relent to my incessant hovering over her shoulder, and hand me the easier tasks such as the rolling of bread slices (for roti gulung), arranging kuih nagasari pieces into the steamer, and more often than not, residual flour dough from epok-epok for me to make shapes and play with. Whilst my mom is undeniably one of the most selfless persons I know, she has yet to pass on a smidgen of her kuih skills, not because she refuses to, but simply because she belongs to the campak-campak (throw here and there) camp, so constantly deciphering what “a handful of this”, or “a pinch of that”, or “to taste” would translate to in metric was a confuzzling joykiller, to say the least.
