Moon cake festival or the Mid Autumn festival is just around the corner. There are galores of mooncakes selling everywhere, from the conventional pure lotus to those fancy ones filled with durians, cheese, chocolates, etc. I have always been a fan of the traditional baked mooncake filled with pure lotus. No egg yolks for me. I don't like the taste of egg yolks. Similarly, I do not like the snow skin type of moon cake. However, I know that most kids like them, due to it being served chilled. So, in order to please my girls, I debuted my mooncake making with the snow skin type.
Ingredients:
A) Skin
45 g glutinous rice flour
45 g rice flour
25 g wheat flour (plain flour)
40g castor sugar
190 ml low fat milk
30 ml condensed milk
40ml pandan juice (juice filtered from blended pandan leaves)
25 ml oil
2 to 3 drops of pandan paste / pandan essence, optional
2 Tbsp cooked glutinous rice flour (microwave at High for 1 min or fry without oil till just browning)
B) Filling
300 g cooked red beans (mashed, filtered from its skin)
60 g caster sugar
80 ml water
70 ml oil
1/8 tsp salt
1½ Tbsp wheat flour
Note : red beans filling can be substituted with others such as lotus paste (which I am also using), mung beans paste, etc.
Method :
1) Combine sifted glutinous rice flour, rice flour, wheat flour and sugar.
2) Mix milk, condensed milk, pandan juice and oil together. Pour into the flour mixture and stir to combine. Drain through a fine sieve into a large and shallow pan, making sure there is no flour lumps.
3) Steam the batter in a wok over medium-high heat, for about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from wok and let cool.
4) Lightly knead the dough by hand until smooth. Cut dough into balls of 20g each.
5) Divide red bean paste into balls of 30 g each. Roll each into round shape.
6) Wrap each red bean ball with a dough portion. Roll and lightly coat with cooked glutinous rice flour. Shake off any excess flour.
7) Place into a mooncake mould. Press to print the pattern.
8) Store the mooncakes in air tight containers. Serve them chilled.
I have a few moulds : doraemon, doraemi, flower, mickey mouse and kitty. The doraemon and flower mould yield the nicest print. The kitty and mickey mouse prints however, were less obvious while the doraemi is a bit difficult to shape.
The doraemon and doraemi moulds are actually cookie cutters while the rest are authentic mooncake moulds. The authentic ones have flowery edges, typical of conventional mooncakes. The cookie cutters served just as well although it comes in various shapes and does not reflect the round shape of a moon. Kids like them though.
Ideally, the skin should be very thin. This is a bit tricky to master for a novice like me although I tried very hard to make it thinnest possible. Once completed, I cut one of the mooncakes just to see how thick is the skin. I was very happy to see that it is not as thick as I thought it to be although there are lots of rooms for improvement.
The mooncakes were left to chill in the fridge for 2 hours before I finally succumbed to my desire to get a bit just to see how it taste. Surprisingly, I find it to be very nice although as mentioned earlier, I do not like snow skin mooncakes.
