Beans Five Ways Part 6: Red Bean Paste

Here's my final project for Beans Five Ways.  I tried to make red bean paste dumplings.
The recipes were fairly simple, but the main ingredients were less common.
Bean paste from Yi Reservation
1cup Adzuki beans
1tbsp Butter
1-2 Cups Sugar
Dumplings from Rasa Malaysia
4 oz glutinous rice flour (sticky rice flour)
100 ml water
3 oz canned red bean paste
Water, for boiling the dumplings

The first step is to cook your beans.  This follows the typical method:  Rinse, Soak at least three hours, Rinse, Boil about one hour.  In the end you should end up with tender beans ready to be pureed or mashed.  Separate and save your cooking water, then add back as needed to make the beans puree easier.
Once your beans are mush put them back into the hot pan, add butter and sugar, cook until they are a thick paste, then allow to cool.  Ta-Da, Red Bean Paste....

Here's my problem, I'm pretty sure my package said Adzuki beans, but my paste was much lighter in color than that from Yi Reservation.  I didn't keep the package though so I'm not positive, but either way I don't think it effected the flavor, they were very sweet on their own and even though I only added one of the two cups of sugar recommended, it turned out way sweeter than I was hoping.  To remedy this I decided to add a little cocoa powder, about one tablespoon, and I think it was a good choice.  It smelled like brownies after that and was still very sweet.

Cocoa

Chocolate Red Bean Paste

The next step was to make the dumpling dough...if you can call it dough.  This was surprisingly more challenging, but only because I have zero experience with rice flour.  There are two types, 'glutenous' or 'sticky', and 'non-glutenous'.  Both contain no gluten, but the 'glutenous' rice flour is made from sticky rice and the 'non-glutenous' is made from short grain rice. see Wikipedia
The only rice flour I could find was just labeled 'rice flour', so I went with it.
Then I ran into another problem...The recipe was all metric.  I'm fairly good with math and measurement though so I got through it, but I definitely got hung up on 4oz of flour...4 fluid ounces of rice flour is only half a cup, but that left me with a soupy mixture, not a paste or a dough.  I don't have a food scale, so I just added flour and mixed until I got the right consistency.  In the end I had about 1 1/2 cups rice flour and about half a cup of water.
The dough reminded me of corn starch and water, but not quite as gooey and hard.  It would make great fun as play dough.  It wasn't too hard to roll the paste into the dumplings, but I think I should have cooked my beans down to a little pastier consistency.  The next step was to boil my dumplings.  Rasa Malaysia recommends boiling them until they are floating, but mine didn't really float to the top, they just floated in the middle, and I got tired of waiting.
I made three shiny little dumplings this way.  Upon tasting them I was a little disappointed.  The texture is smooth but the rice flour got a little dry towards the middle.  The things I noticed most were the outside being bland and the inside being too sweet.  I had my husband taste them, since he's eaten some before, and he said that was pretty close to what he remembers.  Sadly my pictures got lost in the info stream and I don't know how to get them back, but if I make this again I will take new ones.
I think I might try them with the ginger syrup included in the Rasa Malaysia recipe.  The sweet ginger should take car of the blandness of the rice flour:
Ginger Syrup
3 cups water
2-inch piece of fresh ginger, lightly pounded with the back of a cleaver
Rock sugar to taste

Beans Five Ways
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Hummus
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