Possibly Mooncake Biscuits

Mid Autumn Festival was on Monday, 8th September. Mooncake fillings have evolved from traditional fillings of lotus paste, red bean or nuts to tiramisu, coffee, chocolate, etc. My favourite is always lotus paste with egg yolk, wrapped in snow skin, which needs to be kept in the fridge.


The Asian grocers have been selling boxes of mooncakes for the whole month. The only time I had mooncake was when Gary offered us some when we paid him a surprise visit last month. 

As much as I wanted to eat mooncake (lotus paste with egg yolk, please), I couldn't bring myself to buy a box. *shrug* My cravings weren't that strong.

I thought I'd make my own, haha, although not in the traditional sense. I don't have the moulds!

I went with Shanghai pastry, and followed the recipe here. I bought red bean paste as I was too lazy to make my own.

Do you think they look more like siew paus?

After making a batch sized according to the recipe, I decided to make them a bit smaller, just nice for one person to devour it in 3 bites.

The buttery pastry, although not flaky, is good enough to make you want more. This way, the paste was less sweet. Packaged paste is sadly very underwhelming and next time, I think I'll need to make my own.

I'm not happy with how pale they turned out to be, despite baking them just a bit longer. Perhaps milk should be omitted from the egg wash?

Without salted egg yolks, the recipe can make about 20+ pieces if you prefer smaller sized ones.

Ingredients:

Filling

700gm red bean paste

Pastry

250gm salted butter (mine was unsalted, so I added 2 dashes of sea salt into the flour mixture)

150gm icing sugar

380gm plain flour

1 large egg

60g custard powder

Egg wash

1 egg yolk

1 TBSP water

1 TBSP milk (will omit this the next time)

Black and white sesame seeds for decoration.

Directions:

1. Sift flour and custard powder. Set aside.

2. Beat butter and icing sugar til creamy, for 2-3 minutes only.

3. Add in egg and beat til combined. Mix in flour and custard powder and combine to make soft dough. 

4. Wrap in cling film and store in fridge for 30mins.

5. Roll red bean paste into 1 inch balls, set aside. If you're lazy like me, you'll just spoon 1 inch worth of paste into your dough later on.

6. Remove dough from fridge, roll into 1.5 inch balls and set aside.

7. Prepare small bowl of egg wash and another one with black and sesame seeds.

8. Flatten dough balls and insert paste into middle. Wrap it with dough carefully before rolling it into a ball.

9. Place on tray lined with baking paper. Gently flatten it, brush with egg wash and sprinkle sesame seed on top.

10. Preheat oven at 180'C yet? Anyway, bake them for 20 mins at 180'C.

Put them under the grill for a while (til the top turns a bit brown) to warm them up before consumption.
Yums!

Notes:

*I added some roasted pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds into the red bean paste to add a bit of texture.

*Baked them 5 minutes longer.

* The next day, I grilled it for a few minutes just to warm them up before having them for breakfast. It'll give a nice brown top and looked much more appetising. Very yummy when served nice and warm.