Making Snowy Mooncakes

This Sunday we will celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival (aka Mooncake Festival). I remember celebrating this yearly event as a young child in Malaysia, walking around our yard at night with brightly lit paper lanterns, and gorging on delicious mooncakes. In Australia, we would still indulge in the mooncakes (which we could buy from oriental grocery stores), but it wasn't wise to play with candlelit lanterns in the bushfire-prone country. When I was a poor university student, I would wait until after the festival to buy the expensive mooncakes at half-price, and then satiate my mooncake cravings. There are so many types of mooncakes out there with various crusts and countless fillings (including ice cream and chocolate mooncakes, but my favourite type remains the most traditional kind with the plain lotus seed paste filling. One of the contemporary types of mooncake is the non-baked variety known as "snowskin", "ice-skin" or "snowy" mooncakes, which are made with glutinous rice flour and are served chilled. Our residence's clubhouse recently held a workshop to make some snowy mooncakes, and I signed hubby and myself up. Our boy didn't meet the minimum age requirement, but he accompanied us and had a load of fun making and eating the ingredients. It was a very simple recipe using pre-made store-bought ingredients - simple enough for little 6-year-old girls to execute - and the end result was quite tasty!

Our place on the table with the ingredients and tools needed:

The recipe sheet detailing what to do:

Snowy Mooncake Recipe

Makes about 10 pieces

Ingredients

200g snowy mooncake mix powder
300g green bean paste
25g fried glutinous rice flour
80mL warm water at around 80°C

Method

1. Add warm water into the snowy mooncake mix powder and mix well until smooth
2. Divide mixture into ten pieces, roll each piece into a ball, then flatten into a disc. This will be the mooncake 'crust' (or wrapper).
3. Divide the green bean paste into small equal portions (slightly smaller than the wrapper mixture), place on a disc dough and fold the dough to surround the bean paste filling.
4. Apply a little fried glutinous rice flour into the moon cake mold (to prevent the dough from sticking), and then put the ball of dough into the mold.
5. Press down on the mold to produce the mooncake shape.
6. Unmold the mooncake, and freeze for about 30 minutes. Serve chilled.

There were four cute character molds - (clockwise from top left) Hello Kitty, Doraemon, Pooh Bear and Garfield:

Here is a couple we made earlier: