Recipe: Snow Skin Mooncake (冰皮月饼)

Want a taste of snow skin mooncakes in Singapore?  Be prepared to shell out between SGD40 to SGD60 (about USD30+ to USD50+) per box of 8.  Raffles Hotel, which has some of the nicest snow skin moocakes around, was among my favorites and theirs cost SGD64 per box of 8 this year. 

Snow-Skin Mooncake with Champagne Truffle & Ganache from Raffles Hotel.

There's also the baked variety of mooncakes.  The baked version contains a lot more oil and are typically stuffed with lotus paste/jam and salted duck egg yolks.  Apparently, a bakery in Hong Kong came up with the snow-skin variety as a healthier offering.

We're two hours away from the closest 'chinatown' and we haven't seen any snow skin mooncakes at the Asian supermarkets.  There's the baked variety, which I don't like.

As always, if I can't buy it, I'll make it.  However, mooncakes are a royal pain to make.  There's a reason for the hefty price tag, baked or snow skin, and it's not just price and brand.  There's a lot of time, elbow grease, and thought in the process.  You've to be committed, and set aside enough time, as I've learned over the past couple of days.

Our version.  Stuffed with just white lotus paste/jam.

The baked version calls for ingredients which I cannot find at Asian supermarkets here, and have never used them before - golden syrup and lye/alkali water.  Instructions online to make these two ingredients haven't been very clear either.  Like I say, I've always preferred snow-skin mooncakes so that didn't bug me much.

But first, a little bit of cultural history.  Mooncakes are traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrated by ethnic Chinese and also Vietnamese. It falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, and is on September 19 this year.  Legend has it that one upon a time, the earth was visited by 10 suns at one go.  It was so scorchingly hot that the best archer of that time, Hou Yi, was asked to shoot down the suns.  He shot nine of the suns, leaving one to give us light.  He was celebrated and honored by the people and as a reward as well, the Gods gave him the elixir of immortality.  However, Hou Yi had become conceited and tyrannical and his wife, Chang'e, stole the elixir, drank it and flew to the moon where she continues to reside so that she can still be close to the husband she loves on earth.  The villagers, who were grateful for her sacrifice, started making offerings to her on the day she left - 15th day of the 8th lunar month - in her honor.  There are many variations to this story but I'll stick with this version that I remember from childhood.

Mooncakes are part of this tradition of moon worshipping.  In Chinese culture, round shape indicates completeness and unity.  Therefore, sharing mooncakes signifies unity as a family.  Each mooncake is cut into many pieces and shared.

There are other social elements of the Mid-Autumn Festival of which the origins are not known.  On this evening, the moon is supposed to be at its brightest and most beautiful so gatherings in the gardens are common activities.  Children would carry lit paper lanterns  - or battery operated lighted plastic animals nowadays - and walk around the neighborhood.  At some parties, lanterns would be hung in gardens with riddles either clipped or written on them and families would gather around solving riddles, eating mooncakes, and drinking tea.  Actually...this sounds like a fun activity we should plan to do next year with some of our Midland friends.

Ingredients
Part 1: Lotus Paste/Jam
I bag of dried lotus seeds (about 1.5kg or 60oz)
Sugar to taste
Canola oil

1. Soak lotus seeds overnight or for at least 6 hours.
2. Remove insides of seeds.  They're not pits, just mini plants, which can be bitter.

You can either break them apart or push a stick through from the bottom to remove the little plant germinating inside.

3. Boil in a pot over medium heat until soft.  It took us about an hour to get it soft.

4. Put by batch into a food processor and puree the seeds.
5. If you want really smooth silky lotus paste, you could squish the puree through a sieve to remove the bigger bits, or puree again in the food processor with a couple of tablespoon of oil.
6.  Heat up a non-stick wok.  
7. Add pureed paste into wok and over low heat, stir in sugar.  Taste paste to adjust sweetness to the level you like.
8. Once you get the sweet level right, start adding oil 2 tablespoons at a time, mixing until you get a soft creamy consistency.  Sorry I can't tell you how much oil to add - you'll just need to go by feel.

Making this paste is a two-person job!!

9. Once done, set aside and let it cool.

Part 2: Snow Skin
150 g of roasted glutinous rice flour
90g of icing sugar (extra fine sugar)
30g of shortening (any type of fat used for baking that's solid at room temperature)
40-50ml of cold water
A couple of drops of food coloring

1. To make roasted glutinous rice flour, heat a work without oil and fry glutinous rice flour over medium to high heat until lightly browned and smoking.  You've to be careful and keep stirring at this step or you'll burned the flour.

Leon roasted the glutinous rice flour for me!

2. Sieve 100g or roasted glutinous rice flour and sugar together.  Make sure flour is cooled to room temperature before you start this.
3. Rub in the shortening, crumbling the fat into the flour until you get it all mixed up.  It should feel and resemble bread crumbs.
4. Add food coloring to water.
5. Slowly add water to the mixture and knead with your hand.

Part 3: Putting it together
There's even more guestimation in this step.  How much filling versus skin depends on the size of your mooncake mold.  I've a wooden mould that makes 3 tiny mooncakes at a go and since I've never made one before, the strategy I took was to approximate a lump of skin to the size of the mold without stuffing it into the mold, weigh it, and take that as the rough weight of the complete mooncake.  You can buy either plastic or wooden molds from amazon.com

1. Weigh out portions of skin and filling to the proportion of 1:1.  Some recipes online suggest 1:2 but i'm not good enough to get the skin thin and even around the filling so 1:1 is a good start. e.g. 40 g mooncake would use 20g skin and 20 g filling.
2. Roll each portion of skin into a ball and flatten into a circle.
3. Place a portion of stuffing into the middle of the skin.  
4. Close and neaten joining bits.
5. Once you've it smooth and in a ball again, coat with the remainder roasted glutinous rice flour.  
6.  Dust off extras/clumps of flour and push into mold. 

Traditional wood-carved mooncake moulds are such a folk art.  I think I want to start collecting them! 

7. If you've a wooden mold like I, you'll have the pleasure of turning this upside down and slamming it on the kitchen counter to knock the mooncakes out.
8. Store mooncakes in fridge.  Remember that you made these without preservatives (yay!) and so they don't keep for long (boo!).  Share and eat them over the next two days.