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Baking mooncakes is an extremely fun activity to do with kids especially snow skin mooncakes. You don't even have to bake it. Its just like playing with playdough. We had a lot of fun today playing masak-masak.
We wanted to make it even easier, so we bought readymade snowskin mooncake flour also called "Bing Pi Flour" in Chinese. We also bought readymade lotus paste for the filling.
This is the bing pi mooncake mix.
This is the readymade lotus paste. I forgot to take the picture of it in the packet. The packet lists a whole lot of other readymade pastes from yam to, green tea, red bean to durian. My son likes melon seeds in his so as you can see he stuck a lot on one of them.
I thought that the bing pi flour was all you need but then I realized that you needed shortening and emulco as well. Since I didn't have those, I substituted them with butter and olive oil and pure fruit juice. I accidentally bought coffee emulco so I used that too with some three-in-one coffee mix thrown in for good measure. No colouring was used. The boy said he wanted to make ribena mooncakes so we made that too!
Strawberry juice from 4 strawberries and Mango juice from 1 Mango.
Coffee Emulco and Three-in-One Coffee Powder (Did not use the colouring)
Then we set off to work.
"Mom, how much of everything do we have to put?"
"Just put in flour and butter (supposed to be shortening) then add enough cold water and juice to form a soft dough. If you have too much water, add more flour. If you have too much flour, add more water."
We mixed the bing pi flour with butter, cold water and our fresh fruit juice till we got a dough.
Next we used a rolling pin to roll them into a skin to wrap the paste in.
Finally we used a plunger mould to shape the mooncakes.
And tadaa... we have our mango, strawberry, coffee and ribena mooncakes! We had read that the colour would look pale if we didn't use any colouring but they look just fine to us. They are more healthy that way.
After that, the kids had fun being creative with the leftover mooncake ingredients.
Since we have the lotus paste we decided to make baked mooncakes as well. That recipe calls for all purpose flour, alkaline water and golden syrup. Again, we didn't have those, so we used the wheat flour from our kitchen, maple syrup for the golden colour and lemon infused water as substitute for alkaline water.
Making alkaline water
Our wheat flour and maple syrup
And finally tadaa..... (Ok ok we cheated. Our mooncake lost its pattern after baking and it was hard. Hopefully it softens after the oil seeps outwards in a couple of days.) We were hungry after all that baking so we had some store bought mooncakes. The ones below are from Baker's Cottage and Foh San. If only our mooncakes look like that. Next time... we'll get the proper ingredients and a nicer more authentic looking mould. We had wanted a flower or Chinese words design but we ordered online without looking at or selecting the product and got Doraemon when the courier man arrived.
Snowskin Mooncake Ingredients:
- roasted glutinous rice flour (Gao Fen)
- icing sugar
- shortening
- cold water
- Food coloring
- Mooncake filling (red bean, yam paste, lotus paste etc)
We used
- snowskin mooncake premix flour (bing pi flour)
- butter
- olive oil
- cold water
- fresh fruit juice from slow juicer
- ready made lotus paste
Baked Mooncake Ingredients:
- all purpose flour
- golden syrup
- alkaline water
- vegetable oil
- egg wash (added halfway through baking)
- Mooncake filling
We used:
- wheat flour (not recommended)
- maple syrup
- water with lemon soaked for several hours without squeezing the lemons
- olive oil
- egg wash (added halfway through baking) - We baked for 10 minutes, added egg wash then baked for another 10 minutes
- ready made lotus paste
If you are serious about getting your mooncake right, please google for snowskin mooncake recipes or baked mooncake recipes. You will find plenty. Better still search on YouTube to see how it is done the proper way. Have fun and Happy Holidays!
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