With the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival being only a week away, one cannot help but to think of the iconic 'mooncake', or 'Yuebing' in Chinese - a pastry in a circular shape, symbolising the full moon. Traditionally, people are expected to reunite with their family and eat mooncakes together whilst enjoying the view of a full moon on the evening.
My husband is a big fan of mooncakes, so I thought this year we could make have our own personalised mooncakes using custom mooncake moulds. I had once seen a Facebook post (below) where someone had made 'Surprised Pikachu' Mooncakes using a custom mould 3D-printed by themselves. I have some experience with 3D printing from when I worked at a costume-manufacturing company, so this was a perfect opportunity to put my 3D modelling skills and 3D printing knowledge to use.
A snip of the Facebook post (posted in the Subtle Asian Traits group)
Step 1. Gathering References
Traditional mooncakes often had Chinese characters (usually denoting the flavour of the mooncake), repetitive patterns, or florals in their design; the mooncakes are also either circular or square.
Modern mooncakes, however, come in many more shapes， patterns, and even colours.
Step 2. Sketching out Ideas
Because I knew the 'target consumer' of my homemade mooncakes would be my friends, family, my husband and I, so I wanted to include something personalised, such as a drawing of my husband's face, in the design. I sketched out different ideas, and particularly liked the idea of incorporating the text "Mr. Mooncake" into the pattern - this was my husband's nickname when he was teaching in China. Per my husband's request, I also had to design one with my face on it, and the caption "Mrs. Mooncake".
I also decided to add one with a cat's face, in honour of our cat Winnie.
Step 3. Designing the Patterns in 3D
My First Attempt
I started off staying true to my sketch, but when I asked for a 3D printing quote with a mooncake mould factory, I was told that this design would have to be "printed in the proportion of a 100g mooncake mould, in order for the details to be printable"...
And what does this "100g" mean? Well, traditionally mooncake sizes are categorised by the total amount of dough & filling used to make one mooncake.
Suffice to say, a 100g mooncake would be very high in sugar and fat if eaten in one sitting and quite daunting when offered to anyone.
I decided that I wanted my mooncake mould to be a 50g- or 75g-sized, and the resulting mooncakes would be more bite-sized, and they would definitely fit inside those 6x6cm mooncake packaging commonly sold on Amazon. However, this would also mean shrinking and replanning my mooncake design.
My Second Attempt
I wanted to ensure that the lines on my mooncake's pattern would printable, and would hold up its shape when baked, so I took a look at some existing mooncakes that my family had recently purchased. I found that the average thickness of the elevated lines were around 2 millimetres, whiles the gaps between the lines were at least 1millimetres wide.
Left: A mooncake made with custom mould (a mascot pig in a circle), gifted by NetDragon Websoft to its staffs (2022);
Right: A handmade mooncake of a peanut pattern and shape (mould sold widely)
With that in mind, I simplified my previous design, and thicken all of the lines, until I arrived at the result as shown below (The diameter of each mooncake is meant to be 5.5 centimetres):
A screenshot of the preliminary mooncake pattern design, sculpted inside ZBrush
Testing Out More Iterations
Apart from casting elevated patterns on the mooncakes, patterns could also be made by impressions into the main body of the mooncake, and I felt that those impressions often tend to hold their shapes better (similar to the principle of cookie cutters). I made a combination of the said two types of patterns and asked my husband for his opinion on the appeal of those varieties (see below). In the end, he voted for A2 and B2 as he preferred the impressed eyes. I seconded his choices because I was not sure if the elevated dots of the 'eyes' of the faces would hold up their shaped when casted, or if they would get stuck in the nooks of the mould...
Once the designs were decided on, I made the moulds for these patterns using the Live Boolean feature in ZBrush.
Step 4. Modelling the Mooncake Mould
I found a mooncake mould that had a very simple mechanism (see right), which had been sold on Taobao (an online shopping platform in China) and received over 200 positive reviews. Having read the reviews and been assured of its functionality, I decided to also use the same structure for my custom mooncake mould.
The mooncake mould structure was simple enough - I made an alteration where I detached the handle from the disc, so that I could replace the disc with other ones. This way I could produce 4 different patterns whilst minimising the space and cost of moulds.
I sent this 3D file to a 3D printing factory for a quote, and this time - it was printable! And the entire set only costed me 49 CNY (roughly 6 British Pounds) for the materials!
I should add, that most of the mooncake moulds sold nowadays have tiny airholes throughout the patterns, which are supposed to let out air when the mooncake dough is pressed against it. However, there exist also 'Wooden Mooncake Moulds' which do not have these airholes, but still produced very good results. Therefore, I have decided to take a gamble and print my mooncake moulds without the airholes.
Step 5. Receiving the Mould in the Mail!
Here is the mooncake mould!
The pattern discs fitted loosely into the mould, which was perfect, but the attachment between the discs and the handle was a little too loose to my liking - however, this can easily be fixed by putting some blu-tac in-between them.
I am going to make some mooncakes using these moulds. Will the mooncakes turn out okay? Stay tuned for my next blog post!
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