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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 ...

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 ...