I guess making mooncakes is now a yearly tradition for me. 🙂 This year I was extra inspired when I saw ceramic artist @stephaniehshih post an instagram story featuring @wingonwoandco‘s mid-autumn sale. Wing On Wo & Co 永安和 is a porcelain store in New York City’s Chinatown with a lovely modernized take on photographing their pieces. I took advantage of their sale to get the Dreamy Cloud Plate just for my mooncakes and don’t regret it haha.
I wasn’t able to get red bean paste through 99 Ranch delivery, so I decided to make my own. I think it ended up working out really well, since in the past I hadn’t realized the paste for mooncakes requires oil, and I’m thinking the paste I got last year didn’t have any (resulting in a drier dough). I used these recipes (both featuring an instant pot, but with alternatives if you don’t have one):
- Sweet Red Bean Paste Recipe by The Woks of Life
- Easy Homemade White Lotus Seed Paste / Bai Lian Rong by What to Cook Today
I pretty much followed the recipes as is, except that I used coconut oil instead of vegetable oil, and added a dash of salt (since I saw other recipes say that salt helps bring out the flavor). My best advice for the red bean recipe especially is to not cook too much longer once the mixture doesn’t stick to your spatula (my red bean paste was dry and I ended up reheating it with a bit more oil and water).
The photos below of the ingredients and paste making aren’t really necessary.. but I thought they were pretty (aside from the one featuring our gross stove top haha).
The mooncake recipe I used was different than last year’s, mainly because my old laptop won’t start up and I had the recipe saved there. It ended up working out though, because the new recipe I used had some really good tips in it! The most useful for me was: after wrapping the paste in the dough and before putting it in the mold, drop the dough ball in flour and dust it off – this prevented it from sticking to the mold so well!
I pretty much followed this recipe as is, although my baking times had to be a bit longer until I reached the right color. I made a triple batch which resulted in 30 mooncakes.
The one ingredient I wasn’t able to locate was Kansui / Lye Water, so I followed this recipe to make my own with baking soda (last year I used alkaline water from the American grocery store, which I realized this year might be completely different whoops):
For the mold I used this plastic spring/stamp version I got off Amazon a couple of years ago (they no longer have this exact one but I’ve seen similar many places on the internet). When I was growing up my mom and I would use the traditional wooden molds, but I thought my apartment neighbors might not be too pleased with the pounding and went with this more modern version.
I’m really happy with how they turned out! The dough/shells are already softer and more moist than last year’s, which I think has a lot to do with the oil content in the filling (you’re supposed to let mooncakes sit for 2-3 days before eating them so that the oil seeps into the dough).
Not super important, but I always forget to switch out the mold stamp as often as I’d like, so I only ended up with 2 designs this year. 😂
