Home › Search for "mooncake"

Pin

Constellation Inspiration

A Dessert Blog

Search Results for: mooncake

Home Sweet Hong Kong

Hong Kong is my home away from home, a travel destination that is less about having a jam-packed itinerary but reconnecting with people and places that I've missed since my last visit. It has been almost eight years since the last time I was in Hong Kong, which is the longest I've ever been away from the city. It is rare for me to not over-plan for a trip, especially a ten day one, but I knew this trip is more about having dim sum and with relatives to catch up on the last few years. I still managed to visit a few of the cafes and bakeries on my list. I ate at my grandma's home for almost my entire stay there and those were some of the best meals of my trip.

Here are some highlights from my 10 days in the city (in the order I visited them and presented in the photos below):

Food & Coffee

Elixir - my first coffee in the city was at Elixir, a very clean and sleek coffee shop in Central. Most of the coffee shops I visited are in Central and Sheung Wan (both of which have their own MTR metro stops and are in close walking distance to each other) and walking between the two neighbourhoods allowed to discover many more cafes along the way. Despite its mostly concrete interior and exterior, Elixir was actually quite a welcoming space and great spot to rest and enjoy a coffee after hours of exploration in Central. I ordered something that I normally wouldn't order, the osmanthus cold brew + tonic, and really enjoyed it. The osmanthus was perfectly fragrant and the floral notes held up really well against the coffee. It was so refreshing after spending ...

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.

...

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.

...

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 ...