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mumblemumble) wrote2023-12-09 01:12 pm
mumblemumble) wrote2023-12-09 01:12 pm
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Mooncakes, behind the scenes
So, as promised, some notes from my attempt to make mooncakes at home.
I ended up using this recipe for Honey Pistachio Mooncakes, already going rogue with my selection of nuts, somewhere between the pure pistachio filling and the more traditional mix of five nuts and seeds. Oops! I don't have a food processor, so I chopped up the nuts best as I could and mixed in the rest of the ingredients by hand, leading to the somewhat rustic look of the interior. According to other recipes, it's fine-ish to replace the golden syrup and alkaline water in the dough with honey, but I think golden syrup would have been better.
Anyway, for this first attempt I halved the recipe and planned for 6 small mooncakes. However, once I'd made the filling and the dough and divided everything by 6, I ended up with 72 grams of stuff per cake, which is. Too much stuff. You can only fit 50 grams of dough+filling into the molds.
Reader, at this point I was sweating.
I put my oversized dough balls into the molds meant for 100 grams of mooncake, which gave me two flat cakes I used for testing. Then I did some quick maths to divide up the remaining stuff and ended up with 35g of dough and 15g of filling per cake, which seemed reasonable at the time, but now I think that was too much dough? Maybe something closer to 25/25 would have been better.
Anyway, mooncakery in progress:
You bake them halfway, then take them out of the oven and let them cool for ten minutes, brush the egg wash on, then bake them all the way to golden brown. I think I didn't bake mine for long enough.
My kitchen did smell amazing, though.
You have to let them sit in an airtight container at room temperature for a couple of days, to let the oils come out and do their magic. The cakes were hard as rock the night I baked them, but edible three days later. However, clearly not quite right. For mooncakes.
Would I try this again? Yeah! It was fun, in a kind of nerve-racking way, and I do have the molds now. I'll probably try and find golden syrup next time, and use more filling.
And there you have it! 🥮
I ended up using this recipe for Honey Pistachio Mooncakes, already going rogue with my selection of nuts, somewhere between the pure pistachio filling and the more traditional mix of five nuts and seeds. Oops! I don't have a food processor, so I chopped up the nuts best as I could and mixed in the rest of the ingredients by hand, leading to the somewhat rustic look of the interior. According to other recipes, it's fine-ish to replace the golden syrup and alkaline water in the dough with honey, but I think golden syrup would have been better.
Anyway, for this first attempt I halved the recipe and planned for 6 small mooncakes. However, once I'd made the filling and the dough and divided everything by 6, I ended up with 72 grams of stuff per cake, which is. Too much stuff. You can only fit 50 grams of dough+filling into the molds.
Reader, at this point I was sweating.
I put my oversized dough balls into the molds meant for 100 grams of mooncake, which gave me two flat cakes I used for testing. Then I did some quick maths to divide up the remaining stuff and ended up with 35g of dough and 15g of filling per cake, which seemed reasonable at the time, but now I think that was too much dough? Maybe something closer to 25/25 would have been better.
Anyway, mooncakery in progress:
You bake them halfway, then take them out of the oven and let them cool for ten minutes, brush the egg wash on, then bake them all the way to golden brown. I think I didn't bake mine for long enough.
My kitchen did smell amazing, though.
You have to let them sit in an airtight container at room temperature for a couple of days, to let the oils come out and do their magic. The cakes were hard as rock the night I baked them, but edible three days later. However, clearly not quite right. For mooncakes.
Would I try this again? Yeah! It was fun, in a kind of nerve-racking way, and I do have the molds now. I'll probably try and find golden syrup next time, and use more filling.
And there you have it! 🥮