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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

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 Kidsmy little favourite DIY and hosted by Joceline of Butter, Flour & Me. You can link your pandan recipes here.


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17 comments:

  1. Mooncakes look beautiful. Well done! Even Baby C did a good job :)

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  2. I love your snowskin moon cakes! I find them to be a better texture than the traditional ones :)

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  3. Happy Mid Autumn Festival! Still have enough mooncakes to party on tonight? ;-)

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  4. Hi Yen, your mooncake look very nice, well done. Happy Mid Autumn Festival.

    Have a fun day.

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  5. Beautiful mooncakes! Happy Mid Autumn Festival.

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  6. Nice and lovely..Maybe next year I will try it. Still no confidence of making it yet..haha

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  7. Hi Yen, Happy Mid Autumn Festival and love you pandan snowskin mooncakes :)

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  8. Wishing Mid-Autumn Mooncake Festival!

    This moon cake look very nice ~ i like the green colour. :)

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  9. I did moon cake once at a food review before... but it's always feel good to actually make our own moon cake but just getting the mould might be troublesome, maybe i should borrow it from u next year :P

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  10. Yen, you did great! I love the combination of pandan and mung bean :)

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  11. Hi Yen,

    Your mooncakes are beautiful! Your little helper is doing a great job assisting you :D

    Zoe

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  12. Great job , guys ! Those mooncakes look really pretty :D

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  13. Hi Yen, did you cook the pandan juice? or just blend with drinking water then it can be consumed after mixing w flour etc?
    Thank you.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Ai Wei, sorry for the late reply. You can make homemade pandan extract via here: http://goodyfoodies.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-make-your-own-pandan-essence.html

      Basically u need to blend it and leave it for 2 days before u can use it. I also try the boiling method before - you can cut the leaves fine and boil it with water, it will have the pandan fragrance but maybe colour would not be concentrate enough, so maybe u still need to add a bit of coloring.

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Please drop any comments or questions you may have here. Thank you so much for reading!