Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! 中秋節快樂!
I intended to share these cookies with you earlier, ahead of Mid-Autumn Festival, but as with every previous Mid-Autumn season, I lose track of time when making boxes and boxes of mooncakes for family and friends. This year’s mooncakes boxes featured by classic mooncake flavours, white lotus paste with salted egg yolk and pineapple cake with salted egg yolk, alongside one new addition, a fragrant lychee cake (recipe is still a work in progress). I finally got to use the mooncake boxes I made my parents lug back for me back in 2024, and I’m so happy with how they turned out:
Instead of sharing a new mooncake recipe this year, I wanted to share my take of a classic mooncake in cookie form, the flavours of something familiar, in a new way. The salted egg yolk cereal cookie has always been one of the most popular recipes on the blog, so I knew that would serve as a good starting point of this deconstructed mooncake cookie.
Salted Egg Yolk Flavour
My favourite part about biting into a traditional baked mooncake is reaching the salted egg yolk centre, so I knew salted egg yolk had to be the dominant flavour in this cookie. The salted egg yolk flavour is incorporated in two ways: salted egg yolk butter and salted yolk mix-in. There are generally two types of salted egg yolks you can purchase at an Asian grocery store: ones that come in vacuum-sealed clear bag (just yolks) and ones that are part of a salted duck egg sold in a carton or box (whole egg). To me, each serve their own purpose. I like using the vacuum-sealed egg yolks to be centrepieces of a mooncake because they are more orange in colour and brighter in appearance. They are also more firm because they are salt cured as just the yolk. They are less salty than the egg yolks of a whole salted duck egg. I like using the yolks of a whole salted duck egg when I really want to incorporate salted egg flavour in a baked good. These yolks are often much softer and less vibrant in appearance, but because they are softer and saltier, they make it much easier to infuse the flavours of salted egg into whatever it is you’re making. Think cookie dough, ice cream base, pastry creams. I chose to used the softer yolks of whole salted eggs to make ‘salted egg yolk butter’ for the cookies and used the vacuum-sealed, vibrant chopped salted egg yolks as the cookie mix-ins. If you used the former as a cookie mix-in, you won’t get the apparent pieces of egg yolk in your cookie, though you would still get the flavour.
Caramelized Rice Cereal
I love adding a textural component to most cookies I make. Rice or cereal is not something you would normally find in a mooncake, but the delicate crisp of the caramelized rice cereal adds another layer of texture to this cookie. The flavour of the caramelized rice cereal is also rather neutral (it tastes like butter and sugar) so it doesn’t distract from the overall mooncake flavour we’re trying to achieve here.
Mooncake Crisp
Tradition baked mooncakes have a such a distinct flavour due to the use of golden syrup and alkaline water in the dough. To me, those two flavours is what makes a mooncake, a mooncake. To incorporate those flavours into this cookie, I made a mooncake crisp with traditional mooncake dough recipe and topped each baked cookie with it. Not only did it add flavour to this cookies, it also made it very obvious what this cookie is suppose to be.
Mooncake Cookie
Ingredients
Mooncake Crisp Dough
- 30ml golden syrup, *okay to sub honey but mooncakes will be less golden
- 1/4 tsp alkaline water (kansui)
- 20 ml vegetable oil
- 80 g all-purpose flour, more for dusting
Caramelized Cereal
- 35 g (1 cup) rice cereal
- 56 g (4 tbsp) unsalted butter, melted
- 26 g (2 tbsp) granulated sugar
Cookie Dough
- 140 g unsalted butter, room temperature
- 2 cooked salted egg yolks, *from whole salted duck eggs
- 126 g (1/2 cup and 2 tbsp) brown sugar
- 100 g (1/2 cup) granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 large egg, room temperature
- 210 g (1 3/4 cups) all-purpose flour
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 175 g white chocolate, coarsely chopped
- 5 cooked salted egg yolks, coarsely chopped
- 65 g (1 cup) caramelized rice cereal from above
Instructions
Mooncake Crisp
- In a large measuring cup, whisk together golden syrup, vegetable oil, and alkaline water.
- Add the mixture to flour. Using a rubber spatula, fold and combine everything into a soft, smooth dough. Do not overwork the dough.
- Cover the dough and let it rest in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
- Once chilled, roll out dough between two sheets of floured parchment paper (dough will be sticky). Using the stamps of a mooncake mold, punch out mooncake designs. Transfer cutouts to freezer to firm up as oven preheats.
- Preheat oven to 350F. Bake mooncake crisps for 7 – 9 minutes, into deeply golden brown.
Caramelized Rice Cereal
- Toss rice cereal with melted butter and sugar. Using a spoon, spread the cereal into a single layer.
- Bake at 350F until sugar caramelizes and becomes golden brown, about 7 – 8 minutes.
- Remove from oven and allow the cereal to cool completely on baking sheet. Once cereal has cooled, break brittle into small pieces.
Cookie Dough
- Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and salted egg yolk on medium speed until smooth. Add brown sugar and granulated sugar and beat on medium speed until smooth, about 1 minute.
- Add the vanilla and egg to the butter mixture and mix on medium speed until they are fully incorporated, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low until you don't see any streaks of flour, about 30 – 45 seconds. Add the white chocolate, caramelized cereal, and chopped salted egg yolk. Mix until combined.
- With a large ice cream scoop, form 14 even balls of dough.
- Place dough balls at least 2 inches apart on the baking sheet.
- Bake the cookies for 11 to 14 minutes, or until the cookies are browned and caramelized along the edges and the centres are just set. If you would like your cookies to have the crinkled edges, give the pan a few taps on the oven rack before you take them out of the oven.
- Top each cookie with a mooncake crisp. The crisp sticks better to the melted pools of white chocolate. Top with flakey salt. Allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.
![day two: sparkly matcha neapolitan shortbread cookies ✨
the instructions might seem confusing, but if you watch the video to see how the different flavour layers are stacked, it will make much more sense! these slice and bake cookies freeze extremely well so you can make the dough now and bake them off when you want to gift them. (makes 40-44)
vanilla dough:
85g (1/3 cup + 2 tsp) unsalted butter, room temp
45g (6 tbsp) powdered sugar
2 tsp vanilla
90g (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
matcha dough:
85g (1/3 cup + 2 tsp) unsalted butter, room temp
45g (6 tbsp) powdered sugar
90g (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour
2 tsp culinary matcha powder
1/4 tsp salt
strawberry dough
85g (1/3 cup + 2 tsp) unsalted butter, room temp
45g 6 tbsp) powdered sugar
90g (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour
2 tbsp freeze-dried strawberry powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg white
coarse sanding sugar
for the vanilla dough, combine butter and powdered sugar in a bowl. mix until smooth. add vanilla. add flour and salt and mix until no dry streaks remain. do the same for the matcha and strawberry doughs in separate bowls
place one portion of the dough between two pieces of parchment paper and roll into a 5 x 9-inch rectangle that is about 1/4-inch thick. slide rolled out dough onto a baking sheet and freeze for 10 min until firm. repeat this step with the other portions of dough
remove the top piece of parchment from each slab and stack the strawberry, vanilla, and matcha dough layers. cut the slab down the middle the long way to form two 2.5 x 9-inch rectangles. with one half, carefully swap the order of the layers (example: if the first half of the dough is stacked svm, swap the second half so it’s msv. this will ensure that same flavour squares don’t stack on each other). stack the halves. press the layers gently to adhere them. return the stacked dough to the freezer for another 10min
[recipe cont’d in comments]
#christmasbaking #christmascookies #holidaybaking #holidaycookies #cookiedecorating](https://constellationinspiration.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
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