Chocolate Strawberry Xiao Long Bao

Lava cake in soup dumpling form, à la Din Tai Fung. # 412: Chocolate Strawberry Xiao Long Bao

Sad problem alert: I’ve never actually had the chocolate xiao long bao from Din Tai Fung. I’m always too full after stuffing myself with noodles and dumplings galore! Solution: make them myself on a day when I haven’t just eaten a large meal (translation: have the chocolate dumplings BE my meal).

Xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, have always been a bit of a magical mystery to me. How do they get the broth into the wrapper? For the dessert version at least, the answer is frozen ganache. Spreadable at room temperature and liquid when warm, freezing ganache in little teaspoon-sized scoops is the equivalent of stopping time so you can wrap them up in their little dumpling jackets with minimal mess.

What, you don’t have light saber chopsticks? Hands down the best white elephant gift ever.

You can make dumpling wrappers out of just water and flour, but salt and oil swoop in to add flavor and insurance against crumbly dough that doesn’t want to roll out.

While you don’t need to let the dough rise, letting it rest helps to relax the gluten in the flour and make it easier to work with.

I was watching a Jennifer Hsiao baking video and she blew my mind with how she portioned out the dough. Instead of trying to roll it out into an even cylinder that isn’t skinny at the ends and fat in the middle, she bagel-ified the mound of dough, snipped it and straightened it into a perfectly even cylinder. I’m never going back.

Then you just chop the cylinder into little pillows to roll out into dumpling wrappers. Voila!

My regular rolling pin dwarfed the tiny dough pillows so I grabbed a cannoli form instead. Get you a weird metal tube that can do it all.

Freeze-dried strawberries bringing flavor pizzazz without extra water drama.

How do you normally make ganache? My brain automatically jumps to heavy cream, but apparently whole milk and butter work just as well! It can be a little less stable than the cream version, but with the butter upping the fat content, it has a pretty similar texture.