We recently came across one of the cutest recipes on the internet — the Panda Tapioca Milk Tea With Panda Boba Recipe by Japanese blogger Yuki of Yukitchen. In her blog, she teaches you how to make panda-shaped tapioca balls for some delicious homemade bubble tea!

It was too adorable to resist, so we decided to try the recipe out for ourselves. This is how it turned out.

Ingredients:

(For the tapioca pearls)

・50g tapioca flour

・50g silken tofu

・2 Tbsp cocoa powder

(For the milk tea)

・Your favorite black tea

・Milk

＊Serves 1~3 glasses of milk tea

How-To:

1. Knead the tapioca flour and tofu together with your hands.

Yuki warns that the dough shouldn’t be too dry, or else the pandas’ eyes and ears won’t stick. Ours was too wet at first, so we ended up adding more flour.

2. Separate the dough.

Take 1/4 of the dough and knead it again with the cocoa powder. This time, we added too much cocoa powder, so we had to add more tofu. But otherwise, so far so good.

3. Make the pandas!

This was obviously the most time-consuming part, but also the most fun. Like the original recipe, we added ears, eyes, and a nose to each head. The pandas don’t have to be perfect — a lot of ours looked like mice, but they were all unique!

5. Boil the pandas.

Once we mass-produced some super cute pandas, it was time to boil them. We gently placed our beloved pandas into boiling water on low heat. The recipe said to wait until they floated back up to the surface, which Yuki says should take around 5 minutes. For us, the pandas resurfaced immediately after we put them in, so we pretty much just winged it. We suggest eating one before you take them all out (we didn’t), since ours turned out a little hard in the middle.

Be gentle! One of our pandas lost an ear in the process.

6. Drain the pandas.

When you think they’re done, drain the pandas and celebrate your culinary masterpieces! We would’ve done the same had we not noticed we probably used too much cocoa powder. But we still loved our brown little panda bears.

7. Serve with your favorite tea.

Add the panda pearls into your favorite tea and enjoy!

Since the ingredients called for tofu, our pearls ended up tasting like tofu, too. If you’re not a huge fan, you can always substitute it with water.

All in all, our little culinary project was a success! It wasn’t as hard or painstaking as it seemed, and it only took about an hour to finish (but then again, we didn’t use all our dough). And most importantly, they were delicious.

You can see the complete, original recipe on Yuki’s blog here. She also has tons of other recipes for healthy, super cute food you’ll definitely want to try out. Happy cooking!