Search Results for: mooncake

Flour, sugar, and leaveners might be the essentials of any pantry, but for me sago is as much as an essential as those ingredients. Sago has been a staple of family's kitchen and now mine as well. It's the main ingredient of mango sago (and all the other desserts of my sago series), my favourite version of dessert soup, as well as these kabocha salted egg yolk snowskin mooncakes I've been making for years. In my family's kitchen, sago is mostly used for crystal sago cakes, little steamed cakes filled with custard or bean paste. Sago is what makes the cakes special — because when steamed, the sago becomes translucent and chewy, ready to show off the filling that is inside of it. In my family's kitchen, the sago cakes are shaped and steamed inside a muffin pan, but for Mid-Autumn this year, I'm shaping them with a mooncake press to make sago mooncakes.

Sago pearls are not the same as tapioca pearls (commonly found in bubble tea), and can't be used interchangeably for this recipe. Sago pearls are small and white, and become completely translucent when cooked in water. Cooking the pearls completely submerged in water is the more common preparation for sago in Chinese desserts, but for these sago mooncakes, the sago pearls are first soaked in hot water, formed into a dough for the mooncakes, then steamed until they are no longer opaque. The sago pearls form a deeply satisfying chew, but what I think makes these sago mooncakes even more special is that you can see the filling of each mooncake without cutting into them. Using custard will produce a yellow sago ... read more

With Mid-Autumn Festival being exactly one week away, welcome to the first mooncake recipe of the year. I intended to start my mooncake recipe series by earlier this year but I’ve been so busy making the recipes from previous years to give to friends and family. These are the ones that are part of the regular rotation:

In between batches of these mooncakes, I’ve been occupied by making my way to Chinatown to buy candied wintermelon to make this year’s mooncakes: a hybrid between a wife cake and mooncake. A wife cake, sometimes known as a sweetheart cake, is a Chinese bakery classic with a delicate flaky pastry filled with wintermelon, almond or coconut, glutinous rice flour, and sesame. The filling is sticky, slightly chewy, and translucent. Traditionally, the pastry of a wife cake is a combination of a water dough and an oil dough, laminated to create many delicate layers. For these mooncakes, we’re making a classic wintermelon filling and it’s baked inside a buttery sablé, shortbread-like, crust.

Wintermelon is a very mild-tasting fruit (!) that is often used as a vegetable in Chinese cooking. Growing up, I primarily had wintermelon in two ways — in a soup for a savoury preparation and as wife cakes in a sweet preparation. Wintermelon can be found year round at most Chinese grocery stores, but for wife cakes, candied wintermelon is the main ingredient. Candied wintermelon comes in strips, and ... read more

Compared to cookie making and cake decorating, mooncake making is relatively new to me. Despite it being a hobby of only a few years, my growing collection of mooncake tools and equipment would make one think I've been making mooncakes for at least a decade. There isn't a huge variety of mooncake molds and presses out there, but enough for it to maybe appear intimidating to newer mooncake makers.

There are generally two types of mooncake presses: wooden and plastic. Wooden mooncake molds are like paddles. The mooncakes are shaped into a floured mold and for the mooncake to be released, the paddle is hit against a hard surface like a table or countertop. I love the look of wooden mooncake molds, but they are less practical and a bit harder to use than newer plastic mooncake presses.

Plastic mooncake presses are my preferred mooncake shaper. Mooncake presses have a spring and plunger system, where the mooncake dough is inserted into the press and with some pressure against the table, the design will be imprinted onto the top of each mooncake. Because it has a plunger, the mooncake is released very easily. Most plastic mooncake presses come with a variety of interchangeable design plates that can be swapped and locked into the press to create a variety of mooncake patterns. The plastic is usually cream coloured but I've started seeing clear plastic presses which allows you to see the imprint being made — it's quite pretty!

Mooncake molds come in variety of sizes but the most ... read more