Replicating Vancouver

Oddly enough, one of the foods I miss most when I am in China is.... Chinese food. I love Cantonese food. It is the food that I have grown up on. Up north in Tianjin and Beijing, they make different foods. A lot of dumplings and wheat noodles. In the south, they specialize in DELICIOUS food.

One of the things we miss the most is the Chinese Bakeries. They have bakeries here, but they seem to only sell some fusion-Chinese-Western type things, like cream puffs with shredded pork on top (I know....).

What we miss most is the Cocktail Bun, or the BBQ bun. 

When I was home this summer, Jen and I attempted to make Cocktail buns. The recipe is off the about.com site.  We made some modifications to the filling recipe (more sugar).  It was quite successful! See below for a picture. General comments were that the filling was not quite sweet enough, and that the shape was a little off (That was me!) 

Here is a picture of our product.... I will be attempting to replicate these buns in China.... and have come prepared with Coconut.

As an aside, we also tested out using all-purpose flour + gluten instead of using bread flour.  It worked out pretty well. For those of you out there who have never done this before. I added 1 TBSP gluten for every cup of flour and used it in place of bread flour.