Sunday Cooking: Sweet Potato Extravaganza!

I love making steamed buns . . . if you read this blog you know that.  My very good friend Ahsik-bot does not eat pork.  These means she has never eaten my delicious buns.  I follow a fantastic blog called My Little Space, which has just fantastic recipes.  This is where I found a recipe for curried sweet potato buns!  Doesn't that sound like the best ever!  I knew I had to make it for Ahsik-bot.  So, this is the story of our lovely Sunday dinner.
The recipe is in two parts.  One for the curried sweet potato filling (click for it).  And one for the sweet potato buns (clickity click).  Have a look and come back.  I'll wait . . . so now you know your suppose to make up the filling ahead and let it sit before using it.  As I always follow recipes to the letter, I made my filling Saturday night.  You may not that the recipe calls for things in grams, which I'm not particularly good with.  So, I bought rather more sweet potatoes than would be considered necessary.  So, a sweet potato extravaganza indeed.  I ended up making my filling and fried some extra sweet potato for my dinner - stir fried sweet potato and onions on spinach pasta topped with Parmesan cheese.  It was good . . . really. 

Fantastic chicken, sweet potato, and onion curry!

Yummy sweet potato and spinach pasta dinner . . . now with more ninja!!

Today I made up the dough.  I bought what was labeled purple sweet potatoes . . . which was really orange sweet potatoes.  So, instead of pretty purple buns I have pretty orange buns.  The taste is still delicious.  I loved the dough recipe.  It was super easy to make and the resulting dough had a great texture.  I had to add about double the water due to the extreme dryness of Edmonton.  The Edmonton effect as I call it.

Starter . . .

Sweet potato for the bun recipe . . .

dough ready to rise . . .

Big steamed buns

You can see how great the results were.  We had a great dinner of curried sweet potato buns, spinach salad, and korean spicy squid side dish! Yummy!  For desert I made black sesame cupcakes! Recipe found at TheSweetArt (click away).  I doubled it for 12 cakes.  They came out delicious and were a really great end to the meal.

Doesn't that look like a great dinner!

Black sesame cupcakes!

For a great dinner party.  Stuff and steam the buns when the guest arrive.  You can have them help, but it will take longer if they aren't used to bun making.  Make sure to remind them to pinch the dough like they don't like it.  While the buns rest for 10 minutes before steaming mix up the cake batter.  Put the buns on to steam and the cake in to bake.  My cakes took about twice as long to cook as the recipe mentioned.  Serve up the plates while the cake finishes cooking.  Salad takes no time to plate and korean squid side dish can be made in advance (up to a month in advance actually) and plated.  You may have to take the cakes out of the oven in the middle of your meal.  It is worth it though!  Perfect!