Since tonight’s the Mid-Autumn Festival, I thought it would be the best time to put up my very last mooncake post this year. Mooncake making has been a very fun experience and seeing people enjoy them makes me feel pretty darn accomplished. I’ve made them, both baked and snowskin, 3 times already and I think I’ve pretty much found recipes that I like to use.

For the snowskin mooncake, I adapted the below recipe from She Bakes and She Cooks,

Snowskin Mooncake

Ingredients:
115g Hong Kong Flour
115g fried glutinous rice flour (kou fen)
170g icing sugar
1 tablespoon oil
5 tablespoons cold Ice Cream Soda*
1 teaspoon banana essence

Method:

1. Steam the Hong Kong Flour for 15 minutes, leave to cool and sieve.

2. Sieve the kou fen and the icing sugar

3. Mix the Hong Kong flour, kou fen and icing sugar into a bowl

4. Add in the oil, banana essence (or any essence you prefer), cold Ice Cream Soda (or any other colourless soda) and colouring (if needed).

5. Mix until you have a pliable and soft dough. Add enough water that it seems a little too wet.

6. Knead the dough, using kou fen to prevent the dough from sticking too badly, until it’s smooth and pliable. There, the snowskin dough is done!

7. Roll your filling into balls. Filling and skin ratio should be 3:1 so that the skin would be just nicely thick.

8. Wrap the skin around the filling and pop it into the mould and your snowskin mooncake is ready for eating 🙂

* You definitely need more liquid than 5 tablespoons, just add it slowly until you get to a stage where the dough feels slightly too wet.

Notes:

1. Use a push mould, rather than the traditional ones, it’s way easier to pop out and gives a deeper impression

2. The flour will get wet and it will get hard and clumpy, just crush the steamed flour and sieve it. That also means that you’ll need to steam more than 115g of Hong Kong flour.

3. Add the colouring together with the other wet ingredients. It’s too difficult to add in colour when the dough is done. If you want to have different colours, just split the flour and sugar mixture and add in the wet ingredients with the different colours.

4. If you have a stand mixer with a dough hook, it’ll be tempting to use that, afterall, it’s dough, ain’t it? But no, you can’t feel the mixture and it’s easy to add too much water when you use a mixer.

5. In the original recipe, it calls for 2 tablespoons of Hong Kong flour mixed with 2 tablespoons of hot water to be added to the mixture, but I’ve found that it doesn’t make any discernible difference. If anyone can tell me why I need to add the hot dough, I’ll be much obliged!

Traditional Baked Mooncakes 

After 3 tries, I still stuck to the original recipe from Small Small Baker and for someone who’s not really fond of baked mooncakes, I actually really do like this skin. Just some notes:

1. After adding all the liquids to the flour, it’ll seem like it’s too soft, but it’ll firm up after you’ve let it rest half an hour to an hour.

2. Sieve the egg wash to get rid of the bubbles. It’ll destroy the design on the mooncakes.

3. Eating the mooncake right after baking is not a good idea. Not only has it not gone through the process of letting the oil be released into the skin, it’ll taste faintly of alkaline. 2 days later, no more alkaline taste.

4. The colour of the skin will continue to get slightly darker once it cools, so don’t leave it in the oven for too long.

Ok, I think that’s pretty much all I can say about making mooncakes. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I’ll probably never buy another mooncake again. That’s it from the mooncake front and I hope everyone had a great Mid-Autumn celebration or at least enjoyed the sight of the beautiful full moon.