Mooncakes, Part 3: The Ugly, aka Making Them Yourselves

So now we’ve come to the third in our series: The Ugly. This is for those who care less about how their mooncakes will actually look and taste. It’s all about the cultural experience, right? Like making your own misshapen dumplings. If you've been following along, you've found out where to get the tastiest non-mooncake mooncakes and the made-to-impress traditional gift boxes. In this post, we show you what happens when you try and make them yourselves.

First, you need the proper equipment and ingredients. Traditional mooncake molds look like wooden paddles with cylinders cut into them, the bottoms of which are wood engravings of Chinese characters or other images that will imprint onto the mooncake. First, you flatten a piece of dough, wrap it around a sphere of filling (red bean paste, lotus paste, etc.), then shove it into the hole in the paddle, filling it completely. Then you knock the paddle on the table a couple times until the unbaked mooncake comes sliding back out. Then, you bake it.

As we set out to make our own, we discovered that plastic and ingenuity had teamed up to create the snazzy mooncake molds of the future. You just stick your little ball of dough and filling in and just squeeze it right back out.

The modern mooncake molds are sold on Taobao (take a look here), and you can choose from either traditional ones like the “福” character and other intricate patterns, or the more cutesy modern takes like Hello Kitty and, surprise surprise, Angry Birds.

You also need to decide on recipes for your skin and filling. We don’t have an oven in the office, so we opted for the “snowskin,” which effectively tastes like the sweet, chewy glutinous rice covering of a mochi ball. You don’t need to bake it … just mix the powder (which can also be bought on Taobao) with water and shortening to make a sticky dough.

As for filling, you can either buy red bean paste or for a healthier bent, roast some sweet potato or purple yam until it softens. We were pretty experimental, right up to the Haribo Chamallow (pictured above) that a coworker brought which, we’ll tell you now, didn’t really work …

Our mooncakes came out less ugly than we’d hoped, but trust us, some of them were still mighty ugly. (Like the one above … the dough got so sticky we could no longer get it to be any shape but a sphere.)

Have fun with it, and if you really want to learn to make mooncakes the right way, you might want to look into classes at The Hutong or That's Mandarin, where people might actually know what they’re doing.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, everyone.

Photos: Marilyn Mai, Max Wu