Recipe: Homemade Snowskin Mooncakes with Pandan Mung Bean Paste

Firstly, Happy Mid-Autumn Festival to all my dear readers! Have a wonderful celebration with your family.

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I have a confession to make.

Despite being a massive mooncake lover, I have NEVER made any mooncakes in my kitchen before.

But I decided to change that this year and finally made my first snowskin mooncakes at home. I think we're lucky because in Malaysia, we can get ready-made mooncake paste from baking shops easily and they even have snowskin pre-mixes ready in packets. Thanks to some of the hotel's mooncake workshops I attended last year, I have a vague idea how to make snowskin mooncakes. Let's put them into practice! :)

Homemade Snowskin Mooncakes with Pandan Mung Bean Paste

I chose pandan mung bean flavour, since my family is a big fan of pandan flavored mooncakes. For the skin, I used my homemade pandan extract to flavour and colour it. If you do not have pandan extract, you can use green coloring to colour the skin. You can also colour your snowskin mooncake skin with other natural colouring such as blue pea flower (blue), roselle (pink/red) or cocoa powder (brown). I feel the light pastel green tinge from the pandan extract matches very well with the darker shade from the filling.

Once you've decided the colour of your snowskin mooncakes, mix the pre-mix (cooked glutinous rice flour + icing sugar), shortening and water to form a dough. Form both filling and skin into balls, then place in mould, and voila! Snowskin mooncakes - lookwise it is not quite perfect yet, but it sure tastes good. I let the kids help with putting the mooncakes in the mould, which they really enjoyed doing, and Baby C asked if she could bring a couple in for her school teacher and classmates. We also shared some of them with our neighbours.

Baby C was the biggest fan of my homemade snowskin mooncakes, and it was really nice to see her enjoying them with her green tea. The look of satisfaction on her face was just priceless. Everyone agreed that this was really nice and we ended up having early mooncake parties two nights in a row. I really enjoyed making the mooncakes, and this will definitely be something I will be doing yearly from now on. Nice to know my family can enjoy homemade mooncakes, not to mention it is a lot more cost-effective too.

Mooncake Partay!

Homemade Snowskin Mooncakes with Pandan Mung Bean Paste
Recipe by Baby Sumo
Preparation time: 50-60 minutes
Makes 16


Ingredients
1 pack (300g) Crystal Mooncake Pre-Mix
1 pack (35g) shortening
130g cold water
10g homemade pandan extract
1-2 drops green colouring (optional)
Pandan mung bean paste (for the filling)
2 tbsp canola/corn oil

You will need:
63g mooncake mould


1.  Mix the water with pandan essence and colouring. Place the pre-mix in a large bowl, then rub in shortening and then add water and mix to form a dough.

2. Cover the dough with cling film and let it rest for about 20 minutes.

3. In the meantime, prepare the filling. Weigh into 36g each and roll into a ball. Repeat for a total of 16 mooncakes. Set aside.

4. Using your hands, roll the dough into a long cylindrical shape. Cut into small portion, each weighing 27g. Flatten, then wrap the dough around the filling.

Wrap the dough around the filling

5.  Lightly grease the mould with some oil. Roll into a cylindrical shape, then press the dough balls into the 63g mooncake mould. Press firmly, then dislodge from the mould. Keep chilled, up to 5 days in the fridge.

Note: I started off with 21g skin dough, 42g filling, but found this really hard to work with. Best ratio for 63g mould for me is 27g dough, 36g filling.

Tip: I use a straw to remove drops of pandan essence from the bottle. I used about 10g of essence but you can use more for a darker colour.

Not bad for a first attempt, huh? ;)

*I am submitting this to the Little Thumbs Up "Pandan" event organized by Bake for Happy Kids, my little favourite DIY and hosted by Joceline of Butter, Flour & Me. You can link your pandan recipes here.


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