Yummy Workshop

Mid-Autumn fes­ti­val is tomor­row. I actu­ally don’t know much about the Chi­nese lunar cal­en­dar but I know it is ridicu­lously accu­rate in weather pre­dic­tion. Almost always after the mid-autumn fes­ti­val, the weather will start to cool. The fes­ti­val is a cel­e­bra­tion of har­vest, full moon and get­ting together with your fam­ily and EAT of course. As a kid grow­ing up in Hong Kong, me and my brother used to play with lanterns at night on the streets, it would be so much fun. There are the bat­tery or the tra­di­tional lanterns lit with can­dles. Moon­cakes, is a must-eat dur­ing that day. In Hong Kong, where most of the Chi­nese pop­u­la­tion are of Can­tonese descent, I grew up eat­ing tra­di­tional Can­tonese moon­cakes. The essence of the Can­tonese moon­cakes is its thin “crust” and sweet lotus seed fill­ing with a salty and rich pre­served duck egg yolk, rep­re­sent­ing the full moon. Other fill­ings are also used in other types, like a com­bi­na­tion of five kinds of nuts with dried fruits, red bean paste etc. The lotus seed fill­ing is the most clas­sic. Like many tra­di­tional sweets, it is packed with sugar, fats and cho­les­terol, but who can resist eat­ing one in the midst of the fes­ti­val? I know I can’t. l learned how to make them about 5 years ago? I don’t really remem­ber, but ever since learn­ing it, I have never bought moon­cakes. Moon­cakes tend to be over­priced when every­one tries to buy them as gifts for fam­ily and friends. I passed by a local Chi­nese bak­ery a cou­ple of days ago, they are sell­ing them for more than CDN $10 each! It is, at the end, a piece of pas­try. Mak­ing moon­cakes has became a rit­ual for me this time every year. Most peo­ple pre­fer to buy moon­cakes but for me, mak­ing them feels so fes­tive.

tra­di­tional moon­cake moulds

These are tra­di­tional moulds I have at home, they are carved from wood — I like them more than the plas­tic ones because they have very nice details, just some­thing a plas­tic mould can’t produce.

It is dif­fi­cult to explain the ingre­di­ents and method in words so I am not post­ing the recipe here. A good fill­ing needs to with­stand heat from the oven so it will turn out nicely. It also needs to be smooth and has a rich lotus seed flavour. I was able to get a fill­ing that is specif­i­cally made for mook­cakes, I can’t find it here any­where in the Asian super­mar­kets here. The process also requires some tech­nique that is best learned in a demon­stra­tion class (I took a class in Hong Kong).

lotus seed and red bean fill­ing, pre­served egg yolks, plas­tic moulds and a freshly baked mooncake!

I also have plas­tic moulds, they just look flimsy, like toys — the smaller one is actu­ally bro­ken and glued back together by my dad. There is an advan­tage of plas­tic moulds — no knock­ing on the counter like using wooden moulds in order to get the moon­cakes out. I can’t imag­ine the noise level when these were made back in the days before the inva­sion of plas­tics and machines. The pic­ture above is a freshly baked moon­cake, it takes a cou­ple of days for the oil to get absorbed by the crust so it would look less opaque — like what you would find in the super­mar­kets or bak­eries. I just love the com­bi­na­tion of the sweet rich fill­ing with the salty yolks — sooo good! Also, you can never taste fresh moon­cakes if you don’t make them, because store-bought ones are always made ahead in prepa­ra­tion for the fes­ti­val. Fresh moon­cakes are sooo deli­cious with a crunchy crust with a warm fill­ing — sim­ply unbeatable!

Happy Mid-Autumn Fes­ti­val everyone!

Mini Moon­cakes made with wooden moulds — the details are so beautiful!