It's one day until Mid-Autumn Festival. As I had my custom mooncake moulds ready, I booked myself a 'Mooncake Making Experience' at a local bakery. I have written this blog post to record the Mooncake recipe as I was taught at the experience.
Step 1. Prepare the Dough's Ingredients
Below are the ingredients needed to make EIGHT 50g~70g mooncakes. The lye water essential for the making of mooncakes can be found on Amazon, but I have also found a recipe for homemade lye water, which has apparently been adopted by a lot of Chinese students who study overseas and do not have access to lye water outside China (see below).
Step 2. Mix the Ingredients
Separate the ingredients into dry (bread flour, cake flour) and wet (syrup, oil, lye water) bowls, and mix individually. The wet bowl needs to be mixed thoroughly until the texture is a bit like applesauce.
Next, make a hole in the middle of the dry bowl, and pour the wet mixture into it. Then mix the dry parts into the wet parts using a spatula (in a folding + cutting motion), and then hand-kneed the rest of the mixture.
Roll the dough into a ball, then let it sit for 20 minutes in the bowl with a cling film over it.
Step 3. Prepare the Filling & Dough
I do not have the recipe for the fillings, as they had been prepared in advance by the bakery. However, red bean paste (the most commonly used filling in mooncakes) can be purchased in most Asian food stores across the UK, or online on Amazon.
The recommended ratio of filling to dough should be around 3:7 - for example, to make a 50g (around 4.5cm in diameter) mooncake, one should use 15g dough and 35g filling. The filling and the dough are rolled into balls and set aside for the next step.
Step 4. Prepare the Mooncakes
To prepare a mooncake, take a ball of dough, flatten it into a skin, and then wrap a ball of filling into it, forming a bigger ball. Thankfully, the texture of the dough is like plasticine, in the sense that even if it breaks, it can easily be smoothed over.
Here is a video showing the process (watch from 4:55 to 5:40).
Step 5. Moulding the Mooncakes
Roll the mooncake ball in some flour and dust off any excess. Next, placing a dusted ball into a mooncake mould, and press the mooncake into shape using the mould. Again, watch this video to see the process (from 5:41 to 6:36).
If the pressed mooncake doesn't turn out well, it can be re-rolled into a ball to be pressed again. However, I would not recommend doing this more than once, as after pressing the dough twice the fillings can already be slight seen on the surface of the mooncake...
Step 6. Baking & Egg-washing the Mooncakes
Once all of the mooncakes have been pressed, place them onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper. Bake the mooncakes in a preheated oven at 200°C for 20 minutes.
In the meantime, beat an egg yolk in a small dish. Halfway through the baking take out the mooncakes, brush the top of the mooncakes lightly with the egg yolk, then return to the oven to continue baking until golden brown.
Some of my mooncakes lost definition after the egg-wash, therefore it is important not to slab too much egg yolk onto the mooncake!
Step 7. Cooling and Packaging the Mooncakes
Allow the baked mooncakes to cool for another 20~40 minutes, before packaging them into sealed packages (which can be purchased online) or enjoy them immediately.
The bakery provided the packaging and packets of desiccants, and a staff helped me seal them using a special laminator. The desiccants and the laminator may not be available online, which would shorten the mooncake's shelf life from 2 weeks to 2~3 days.
Step 8. Enjoy the Mooncakes!
Here are some pictures of my mooncakes! Can't wait to share them with my family tomorrow at the Mid-Autumn Festival!
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