I guess it’s that time of the year again to make mooncakes. Last year, I was away from my family (in Sydney), so there wasn’t any mooncakes around, except that it would be very costly (Ok, maybe not, but buying and eating mooncakes alone isn’t really a happy thing to do.) Anyway, last year I made 2 mooncakes; Sweet potato & pumpkin baked mooncake and custard snowskin mooncake. That would be my very first time making mooncakes. No, actually I’ve made another one before which I made just for fun; Pandan Spiral Mooncakes. I like to categorize my mooncakes into 6, although there are many more; normal, snowskin, flaky, shanghai, ice cream and jelly. There should be much more variations but I guess the first 3 are the more traditional types.

So this year back home, things are easier as it’s WAY WAY WAY easier to get ready-made pastes for the mooncake. I mean, you get stuffs like dragonfruit, mushroom, tomato and even cincau (grass jelly). Dude, I’m not kidding. Really. I’ve seen even ready mixed snowskin mix packages. So making mooncakes at home, really, isn’t anything hard. Plus! there are even boxes to pack homemade mooncakes and send them out as gifts. Oh how clever!

Too much mumble. tsk. Lets start

Ingredients for snowskin

75g commercial koh flour (can be found in local baking ingredients store)
100g icing sugar
25g shorterning
few drops of pandan essence
few drops of green colouring
100ml iced water

Filling
Lotus seed paste (or any paste of your choice)
Roasted melon seeds

Method

• Sift koh flour and icing sugar into a mixing bowl
• Mix in pandan essence and green colouring with water
• Add all ingredients into the mixng bowl and combine into a soft dough.
• Scale at 25g each. Shape into round balls and keep aside.
• Combine fillings and scale them into 30g round balls. Say if you have 12 balls of snowskin. You need 12 x 30g paste + melon seeds. Get ?

• Sprinkle some koh flour onto surface, roll flat but make sure it’s not too thin or else you’ll get uneven amount of snowskin and filling.
• Wrap in the paste and slowly round it. It’s sorta like making pau. Try to seal the ends.
• Roll into a ball and push into mooncake mould that’s dusted with some koh flour.
• Press in lightly to form the shape. Knock out the imprinted mooncake.
• And you have your mooncake! Chill in fridge for at least 20 minutes before serving.

Note: The weight of snowskin and filling depends on which mould you use. Try to stick to a ratio of 40% skin weight and 60% filling weight, more or less.

Tada !! see, it’s just very easy to make!! Althout I would say, moulding the shapes would be the hardest cause sometimes the skin is too thin or thick. Or the surface is not smooth enough, or this that this that. But lotsa practice would be suffice. There’s no magic to those people behind the windows making siu long paus like machines because thats what they do the whole day!!  and everyday!