Adventures in Cooking: Homemade Mooncakes

Mid-Autumn Festival has come once again! Growing up in central Pennsyvlania, it was difficult to celebrate Chinese holidays with the full pomp and circumstance that they traditionally demand and deserve.

In China and Chinese communities around the world, Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated with a lead-up that lasts for weeks (not unlike the way Americans celebrate Christmas) and is a special time for friends and family to get together.

Whereas my Mid-Autumn Festivals in Pennsylvania generally consisted of looking at the moon on the actual night (with no lead-up whatsoever), commenting on how big and bright it was, and eating a traditional egg-y mooncake, then moving on to whatever TV show was on that night. 10 minutes, bam, Mid-Autumn Festival celebrated. Yet mooncakes still made it into our meager celebrations, because they’re that important to the holiday.

Mooncakes are like the fruitcakes of the Chinese holiday world. They’re given out to friends, family, coworkers, etc. to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival, but usually you secretly eat one or two then toss the rest. Well, as it turns out, just like the Festival itself, mooncakes are much more than what I originally thought them to be.

Traditionally, mooncakes are round pastries, with three parts:
– A salted egg yolk center (to represent the moon)
– A sweet filling made of some sort of paste – red bean and lotus seed are common
– A doughy outer shell, with a traditional or symbolic design stamped on top

These days, mooncakes are much more high-end. No longer are they just egg-paste-dough; they can be made with all sorts of fancy and creative ingredients. Starbucks have their own version, as do Haagen-Dazs, and every fancy hotel and restaurant in town. I’ve seen then run from $30 for a box of 4, to over $200 for kopi luwak mooncakes!

To be honest, mooncakes aren’t my favorite – but I still missed receiving them for Mid-Autumn Festival. Luckily for me, my friend Jobea is a super-baker-extraordinaire and we had a fun night creating our own. (Jobea had recently taken a mooncake cooking class, so I’m not sure of the exact recipe as she did the prep. But I helped put it all together!)

For our ingredients, we substituted salted egg for a pineapple ‘yolk’ covered in coconut shavings — the coconut helped in reducing the pineapple’s stickiness.

Our paste was made from pandan, a green leaf commonly used in Southeast Asian cooking for flavoring and its bright green color. Jobea also worked dark chocolate chips and almonds into the paste.

I’m not sure what was in the dough, but I can tell you it stretched very thin, very easily.

To start, we wrapped the pandan paste around the pineapple ‘yolks.’ Slightly tricky as there was not much paste to work with, and the almonds and dark chocolate chips had to be smoothed over as well.

Then the green paste balls were covered in the thin dough, which was also tricky. The dough ripped easily, but you still had to make sure the whole ball was covered evenly.

Jobea had bought a mooncake ‘stamper’ that would create a special rabbit design, as this is the Year of the Rabbit.

It took a few tries, but we realized the mooncakes turned out best when the dough fit perfectly inside the stamper. If there was any bit sticking above the edge, it was going to be a fat, unsightly mooncake.

Below, you can see my fat, unsightly mooncake. The pretty rabbit in the forefront is what the rest of the mooncakes should have aspired to be.

Then we baked them until they were nice and golden brown…

Then we cut them into slices, as is traditional, and shared them with our friends. (The green ones are obviously our freshly made ones; the ones behind are traditional egg yolk ones that Jobea made in her cooking class.)

This was definitely a Mid-Autumn Festival to remember. While I didn’t see my family or even check out the moon this year, like all the other traditional holidays I’ve spent here, it was still celebrated — with a twist, and made even better — thanks to our great friends in Singapore.