Our first experience in China while Living in Beijing
Jas woke up a few days feeling real nostalgic for China. When my husband asked her why, she said: “I miss the piggy buns!!!”
The piggy buns! Our first ever meal in Beijing in August 2019.
Baozi are steamed buns filled with sweet filling, the ones we ordered were decorated to look like piggies and filled with a sweet potato paste (go find out how to pronounce it properly something like baaao-dzuh)
Our baozi: well, I wanted to ease her nostalgia by showing her videos of how baozi are made, but then realized how simple they are to make! Soooo we made panda decorated, sweet-yam-filled baozi.
Cooking planning with children
For a whole day we made plans for the following day, our first time ever making these delicious Chinese traditional treats. We watched a ton of videos. I kept on eye on the ingredients and which looked the most simple and the most traditional. Especially keeping an eye on those who used the least amount of kitchen equipment…maybe that won’t be a deal-breaker for you. For me, well we are living in a very limited kitchen of this AirBNB home.
We don’t usually purchase all purpose flour, but my husband made an exception for this occasion! We watched quite a few videos before finally pulling our sleeves back and digging in. Here are a few that I felt covered all the basics and that I followed the most.
Videos we watched
- This is the video I watched to follow step by step to make the Baozi, the tips in the comments helped too as far as using instant yeast and water portion etc. CLICK HERE!
- This is the video I followed mostly for the panda decoration CLICK HERE!
As you can see my kiddos decorated their baozi with pandas! I saw a tip saying to use cacao as a natural dye…so brown panda it is! My littles loved it, it never ceases to amaze me JUST how forgiving they are of imperfections. They were equally amazed at how yummy and cute the Baozi came out!
Mind you, I said it’s simple, but it does take time, letting the dough rise, then rest after rolling, then rest after filling, it’s a bit finicky but worth it!
Check my IG and Stories to see all we did together!
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