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Jelly Mooncakes

I am deep into mooncake making and we're in the final stretch before the big day. Mid-Autumn Festival is in five days (umm why does time go by so quickly) and I feel like I'm running out of time to share all the mooncakes I've been making this season. My mooncake world has been an exciting one this year:

Cherry Bombe invited me to be a guest on their baking podcast, She's My Cherry Pie, and I got to geek out about all things mooncakes with the wonderful Jessie Sheehan. You can listen to it here!I got a bunch of new mooncake presses and molds this year (like this snoopy one) and my collection is growing at an exponential rateI started playing with coloured mooncake dough (natural powders like matcha and strawberry as well as gel food colouring) and I'm surprised I haven't done it sooner? I'm so proud of these apple tree mooncakes even though I was so close to having a meltdown while making the tiiiiiny applesI made blue skies jelly mooncakes and they quickly became the most popular mooncakes I've shared this year

I've been sharing all types of mooncakes the last few years but a jelly mooncake being the most popular mooncake wasn't something I would've predicted to be on my 2023 Mid-Autumn bingo card. I've made jelly mooncakes here and there for fun but it was never something I've taken as seriously as perfecting my sablé cookie crust on my baked mooncakes. Jelly mooncakes are far from traditional, but a fun option for Mid-Autumn.

I made two jelly mooncakes this year — a green apple-flavoured jelly mooncake that's light blue with little coconut milk ...

Mooncake Molds & Presses

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.

Types of mooncake presses

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!

Different sizes of mooncake presses

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

White Lotus Mooncakes with Sablé Crust

Tomorrow is Mid-Autumn Festival! Happy early Mid-Autumn! I'm done all my mooncake making for this year (I made close to 10 batches!) and I did a little recap over on Instagram last night. Besides making mooncakes leading up to Mid-Autumn and having a family dinner the night of, I don't do too much for Mid-Autumn. When I was younger, my family would join my friends' families for a lantern walk around the neighbourhood but unfortunately that was a tradition we grew out of as we grew up. This year, however, I tried my hardest to add more Mid-Autumn festivities — tonight I'm going to a show at the planetarium (!!) where they'll be projecting Mid-Autumn folklore onto the Star Theatre (!!!!!!) and tomorrow I'll visit the Chinese Garden to enjoy all the lanterns and artwork. Apparently there will also be a mooncake tasting at the gardens, so I will finally be able to eat mooncakes made by someone else other than me. I always enjoy other people's baking more than my own.

I feel like every Mid-Autumn I develop some new mooncake obsession. Three years ago, I was trying to perfect the traditional baked mooncake, while snow skin mooncakes were all I could think about the last two years. This year's mooncake obsession is sablé. I know what you're thinking... "Really Amy, sablé in mooncakes? That's not traditional." Traditional mooncakes have a softer, oil-based dough and I love that. I made several batches of mooncakes with a more traditional dough recipe but my favourite mooncakes that I made this year has to be the ones with a crisp, buttery sablé dough. The ...

鳳梨酥 Taiwanese Pineapple Cake (from Mooncakes & Milk Bread!)

Many amazing cookbooks came out this year and it's been getting quite difficult to keep up and bake from all of them. Of all the books that came out this season, Mooncakes & Milk Bread was the one I looked forward to the most. I'm quite drawn to Chinese bakeries and pastry techniques and when I found out that Kristina's book would be spotlighting all these bakeries that helped shape local Chinatowns, I got so excited. In addition to sharing traditional and modern interpretations of Chinese recipes, Kristina also talks to many Chinese bakery owners about why these businesses are so important to Asian American culture. Chinese bakeries have so much history behind them, whether they're in Vancouver, the Bay Area (where Kristina is now), or any city in the world. Growing up, I've always felt that Chinese bakeries that sold $1 pineapple buns were inferior to patisseries that offered $5 croissants and it wasn't until in the recent years that I realized my thinking has been wrong all these years. Just because these Chinese baked goods are priced lower than Western pastries, it doesn't make our steamed cakes and milk bread less worthy in any way. Perfecting mooncakes is equally as difficult as perfecting choux pastry and I now choose to put as much effort into learning how to make all the baked goods I ate growing up.

The recipes from Kristina's book range from fluffy milk bread (which is the base of a lot of Chinese baked buns), steamed buns, her grandpa’s almond cookies, mooncakes, fruit cakes, egg tarts, and dumplings. It was quite difficult to choose the first ...

Matcha Mooncakes with Chestnut and Salted Egg Yolk

Just two more days until Mid-Autumn Festival! In previous years, I would most likely be on my second or third box of store-bought mooncakes but because celebrations are smaller this year and my family hasn't been visiting family friends and relatives, our stash of mooncakes (both gifted and bought for entertaining) in the house has been quite small. I don't really mind though because this year compared to all the past ones, I've been making a lot more mooncakes. Originally I thought I was done mooncakes for this year since I've made so many batches, but the rainy weather this weekend called for lots of baking at home. I've played with snowskin dough and traditional baked dough... but this weekend I wanted to flavour the dough and what better flavour to use than my go-to flavour for all things sweet — matcha. This recipe is based on my original baked mooncake recipe with the additional of matcha to the dough and a chestnut filling. I put a yolk in half of the mooncakes so non-yolk-lovers (I don't know why anyone would dislike a salted egg yolk centre!) could have mooncakes too. If I don't post another last minute mooncake recipe in the next two days, I wish you and your loved ones a very happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Thank you for all the mooncake love!
Cherry Bombe
The Bake Feed
NUVO Magazine (recipe)
Food.com (recipe)
Bake From Scratch
...and to everyone that has been making my mooncake recipe and tagging me!

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Taro and Salted Egg Yolk Mooncakes 2.0

It has been several years since I published my first mooncake recipe here on the blog. The first few times I made traditional baked mooncakes, they didn't have the perfectly golden hue and the salted egg yolk almost peeked through the crust. A few years later with a many rounds of practice, I'm happy to share the better version of the first mooncake recipe — taro and salted egg yolk mooncakes. Here is what I wrote in that recipe a few years back:

Mid-Autumn Festival has always been one of my favourite holidays and this year it falls on September 24. Growing up, my mid-autumn festivals have always been filled with paper lanterns and mooncakes. I would always have family dinner on the night of mid-autumn and walk over to friends' houses to play with paper lanterns. When I was younger, I would eat mooncakes just for the salted egg yolk centre. I did not develop an appreciation for the rich and intense lotus seed filling until I got a bit older. A mooncake is not what we normally associate with the word 'cake.' It is a puck-sized dessert of an intensely rich and earthy lotus seed paste baked inside a thin, soft crust. A salted duck egg yolk in the centre of the mooncake to represent the full moon on mid-autumn. The salted egg yolk is slightly sweetened by the lotus seed filling and is the perfect combination of sweet and savoury.

The biggest difference between these mooncakes today and the mooncakes several years back is from the additional of two key ingredients: golden syrup and lye water. These two ingredients work together to create the ...

Kabocha Salted Egg Yolk Mooncakes with Sago Pearls

I cannot believe we are already three days into September. The summer fair has wrapped up and the $1 ice cream cone special from you-know-where has ended. I still have an ice cream sandwich blog post (for these!) I want to share but it seems out of season now? Do we still care about three easy homemade ice cream sandwich hacks? Can I still make a cake that features a flamingo floatie on top? Those are the type of questions that have been floating in my head for the last few days. I. Am. Dreading. Fall.

I have stated in the past that my least favourite type of baking is fall baking. I am not that into all the warm spices and the lack of berries and stone fruits makes me a bit sad. Also, I do not want to add pumpkin purée in any of my baked goods. Occasionally I can find some joy in making a fall apple or pear pie (lattice top, of course) but if I had to choose a favourite type of fall treat to make it would be mooncakes to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival. I started making mooncakes last year, both the traditional kind with a salted egg yolk centreand the 'snowy skin' variety with taro and coconut, and have become obsessed since. I love buying all the different patterns for my moon cake press. Since last year, I bought a new mooncake press! A smaller square one! My older press makes a mooncake with 100g of dough and filling while this new one makes 50g moon cakes. I actually prefer the smaller press because I really like mooncake dough, especially snowy skin mooncake dough because if the mochi-like consistency. I decided to ...

Taro Coconut Snowy Mooncakes

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! I did not intend on making more mooncakes this year after making the baked taro and purple yam with salted egg yolk mooncakes last weekend. I had so much taro leftover from the previous week and I found two other sets of mooncake molds, that it only seemed appropriate to be extra festive and make more mooncakes this weekend. Even though it might be a bit too late to share this recipe (though I highly encourage making these the day of Mid-Autumn), it is too good not to share.

Unlike traditional mooncakes, snowy or 'snow skin' mooncakes are not baked. Snowy mooncakes can have similar fillings as traditional mooncakes but their wrappers have a soft and chewy mochi-like consistency rather than the consistency of a pastry dough. The wrapper dough takes on whatever colour you want it to be. A teaspoon of matcha powder could be added to make a beautiful green mooncake and beetroot powder could create many shades of pink. Next year, I will make snowy matcha mooncakes filled with custard, please hold me to that. 

For the mean time, I have these little gems for you. These snowy mooncakes are filled with a velvety taro and coconut mixture. The filling is encased in a soft and chewy wrapper that I coloured pink and purple to match. To achieve the marbling effect for the wrapper, simply add different types of gel food colour to the dough and mix lightly. Mix the dough until the desired marbling is achieved. Working with glutinous rice flour ...

Crispy Pumpkin Mochi Cakes (3-Ingredients)

A pumpkin recipe! Rarely do I share pumpkin recipes because I get overwhelmed by all the pumpkin recipes that surface the internet during the fall months and pumpkin just isn't my favourite ingredient. Don't get me wrong, I love using kabocha squash (or Japanese pumpkin) in a lot of my cooking and baking — kabocha cheesecake cream puffs, kabocha salted egg yolk sesame balls, and kabocha mooncakes —but I'll always choose kabocha over pumpkin for both flavour and texture. These pumpkin mochi cakes might be the only exception.

These 3-ingredient mochi cakes call for canned pumpkin purée (not pumpkin pie filling) that one would use to make pumpkin pie or muffins. It's a great way to use up any pumpkin purée you have leftover from other fall baking projects. Because there are no eggs involved, you can easily scale the recipe up (to make 20 mochi cakes) or down (to make 4 mochi cakes). Glutinous rice flour, or sweet rice flour, is added to the pumpkin purée to create the base of the mochi dough. It's important to get glutinous rice flour and not just regular rice flour so you get the chewy, sticky mochi texture. Granulated sugar is added to the mixture for a bit of sweetness and you can leave it at that if you like. I normally make it a plain pumpkin mochi but if I'm feeling fancy, I will make a simple 4-ingredient brown sugar filling (making this a 7-ingredient recipe!) for the mochi. The brown sugar filling is warm and sweet, much like the filling for a brown sugar pop tart. The mochi cakes are pan fried, giving them a crispy, golden exterior while the ...

Pumpkin Cut-Out Sugar Cookies

I'm finally resurfacing from the chaotic baking season of Mid-Autumn Festival, where I baked so many mooncakes and filmed so many mooncake-making tutorials for Instagram and Tiktok. It's hard to find baking inspiration after a big holiday because I go 110% leading up to the holiday and I'm out of both motivation and unsalted butter shortly after the holiday passes. I'm back now and I have been recipe testing lots of pumpkin things behind the scenes as well as working on a lot of fall cookie decorating ideas that I can't wait to share with you. I'm still contemplating whether I'm going to do a haunted gingerbread house this year (because I don't think I can top last year's gingerbread pumpkin stand) — semi stay tuned? For now I'm excited to share a pumpkin sugar cookie recipe that is versatile for many different types of bakes during the fall season. I've used it to make these iced sugar cookie ghosts and pumpkins as well as a pumpkin sandwich cookie with nutella cheesecake filling (!!) that I will be sharing soon.

This pumpkin sugar cookie recipe is great for making cut-out cookies with your favourite cookie cutter. The dough comes together really easily and you don't need a mixer to make it. It doesn't spread much but I do recommend chilling your cookie cutouts before baking to make sure the cookies retain their shape as much as possible.

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Salted Egg Yolk Pineapple Cakes

If you're not familiar with Taiwanese pineapple cake (鳳梨酥), which is drastically different than pineapple upside down cake or any pineapple cake outside of Asia, it's a bite-sized pastry of a jammy pineapple filling with a tender short crust. Taiwanese pineapple cakes fall somewhere between a filled cookie and a small pie, and is not what we commonly think of as ‘cake.’ Traditionally, the outer pastry of a traditional pineapple cake is made of lard, and the filling is mostly made of pineapple mixed with winter melon, but it's more common now to have a pure pineapple filling. They're often baked in square molds but you might also find some shaped with more decorative molds.

I grew up eating taiwanese pineapple cake — these square-shaped pastries were often my after school snack or my mom would include two of them in my lunch box. The ones I ate came in a see-through plastic sleeve but in recent years I’ve branched out and tried other versions of Taiwanese pineapple cake. My favourite version of pineapple cake now is a pineapple mooncake! Specifically a pineapple mooncake with the traditional salted egg yolk centre. My family always buy these salted egg yolk pineapple mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival and they're always the one I go for first (sorry lotus paste!!!). After eating them for years, I decided it's finally time I create my version of the pineapple mooncake.

I've shared Kristina's pineapple cake recipe on the blog before in celebration of the release of her amazing cookbook, Mooncakes and Milk Bread, and the recipe makes a more ...

Salted Egg Yolk Kabocha Sesame Balls

There are exceptions for everything and sesame balls are my exception for my indifference towards sesame. I like sesame when it's part of furikake mix, when its used to dress gomae, or sprinkled on top of a stir fry, but I never gravitate towards a slice of black sesame cake, cookie, or sesame in any sweet application. I think the redeeming factor of a sesame ball for me is it's intensely chewy and tender mochi-like layer.

Sesame balls are commonly found as part of Lunar New Year celebrations because its round shape is suppose to symbolize togetherness and unity though they can be found year round at dim sum restaurants and Chinese bakeries. They're made with relatively little ingredients — glutinous rice flour, sugar, water, sesame seeds, and your filling of choice. The pastry is coated with whole sesame seeds on the outside and is crisp and chewy. The filling sits inside a hollow interior that is caused by the expansion of the glutinous rice flour dough. I don't care for the traditional black sesame filling, but the mochi encasing the black sesame? Sign me up. For my ideal sesame ball, the mochi layer would be thick and the black sesame centre would be swapped for something else that's creamy. The sesame on the exterior can stay because it is a 'sesame ball' after all.

These sesame balls have a traditional exterior but the filling is a mix of my two favourite things: kabocha squash and salted egg yolks. I made a similar filling for mooncakes in the past, but it is even better inside a sesame ball. The crisp exterior serves as a nice contrast for the ...

Salted Egg Yolk Shortbread Cookies

I've been meaning to share a recipe for salted egg yolk shortbread cookies for quite some time. I started making them about two years ago and they've always made great gifts, especially around the time of Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival. With every batch, I tweak the recipe just a little to make sure the current batch is better than the previous one. I did a fine chop of salted egg yolks for the the first batch and it gave the cookies a hint of salted egg yolk flavour. The several batches after that had larger chunks of salted egg yolk peaking through in the dough because of the rougher chop. I loved seeing the larger chunks of golden yolks but the flavour wasn't as incorporated into each bite of the cookie. This version, which I think is the best one yet, incorporates the yolks earlier in the process. Instead of folding in the chopped up yolks into the already formed dough, the yolks are creamed together until very smooth to make a salted egg yolk butter as the base for the cookies. I've found that the salted egg yolks that come as whole eggs work better for this than buying packs of just the yolks, which is what I prefer for making mooncakes for Mid-Autumn. The yolks that come as whole eggs aren't as translucent or golden, but they are creamier and much easier to incorporate into the butter. These cookies are still sweet, but have the fragrance and savoury qualities of salted egg yolks.

This recipe requires few ingredients like regular shortbread but creates a cookie with so much flavour. I'm including these in my Lunar New Year cookie box or chun ...

Kabocha Cheesecake Cream Puffs

I feel like I'm stuck in this weird phase in between two major themed baking holidays — Halloween and Christmas. Is it too late to still share pumpkin recipes? Are we still into fall baking while slowly listening to more Christmas music everyday? Or is it okay as long as I do it before December 1? I'm going to leave you with the recipe for these kabocha cheesecake cream puffs and you can take what you need.

Kabocha squash is one of my favourite things to eat, whether it's in a sweet or savoury preparation. I had a phase in my life where I would eat the squash everyday and part of almost every meal — it was a wild time. I don't eat it nearly as much now but still really enjoy a kabocha filled chewy rice cake from one of my go-to bakeries in Chinatown, in the form a pumpkin croquette at Japanese restaurants, and my mom's kabocha cream soup whenever I go home for dinner. I also love using kabocha in a few of my recipes including kabocha salted egg yolk mooncakes during Mid-Autumn Festival, taro coconut sago dessert soup (I add cubes of kabocha!), as well as subbing kabocha for yam in these dessert cups with grassy jelly. If you have a recipe you love making that features kabocha squash, please share it with me! In the meantime, I hope you love these pumpkin-shaped kabocha cheesecake cream puffs.

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Osmanthus Flower Jelly (桂花糕)

Chinese New Year is just around the corner and I have been making all the Chinese desserts (like these grilled rice cakes) in anticipation of the big day. The fact that Chinese New Year is a 16 day celebration means I get to share even more Chinese desserts with you. Osmanthus flower jelly is not traditionally a new year treat, but letting the jelly set in a koi fish mold and adding edible gold leaf to it makes it a new year-worthy dessert. If you're not familiar with Chinese New Year, there are certain dishes that are eaten on new year's eve or day for their symbolic meaning. The auspicious symbolism of these traditional foods is based on their pronunciations or appearance. For example, noodles symbolize longevity, sweet rice balls is suppose to represent family togetherness, mandarin oranges for fullness and wealth, new year cake (nian gao) symbolize progress, and whole fish is served to bring surplus the following year. There are many fish motifs around the holiday, whether it is a whole steamed fish at one of the main dinner dish or fish-shaped nian gao for breakfast or dessert. If you like to make sure you get all the luck and surplus in the new year, you're suppose to leave a little bit of the fish remaining on the plate as you finish dinner, which expresses the hope that the year will start and finish with surplus. In other words, you want to make sure 年年有余.

Even though my family is not extremely superstitious, we do follow the basic new year traditions of eating nian gao, steamed fish, sweet rice balls, and not washing your hair on new year's day (it ...

Playing with Isomalt + Totoro Shaker Cookie

Happy New Year! I hope 2018 was everything that you wanted and dreamed of and I also hope that your 2019 is even better. The past week I would argue was one of the busiest but most wonderful weeks of the year. It was extremely busy because of all the holidays and my irrational (yet delicious) decision to make a different type of Christmas cookies every day of the week. Despite all the busyness, the week has been a reflective one. Busyness always renders itself as a tool that helps me prioritize what is important and what I want to focus on more in the upcoming year. Between work, all the holiday baking, and holiday preparations in general, I took some time to sit down and write down all the things I want to accomplish in the next little while. I would not call these hard-to-achieve 'resolutions' but gentle reminders of what's important and achievable goals that promote growth whether it is growth in baking or myself in general.

I am proud of myself for all the new things I tried and skills I attained this past year — I made choux pastry for the first time and immediately fell in love with making it despite the first few batches falling a bit flat; I taught myself how to pipe buttercream flowers by watching some YouTube videos and giving myself lots of time (and buttercream) to practice; and I made moon cakes, a seasonal treat I grew up eating during Mid-Autumn Festival, for the first time. Besides learning to make new kinds of desserts, I invested in my new favourite lens (my 24-70!) for my camera and shot a ...