Mooncakes And Snowskins

When it comes to figuring out a good Christmas gift for our parents, it’s a real challenge. You see, our parents are extremely “low-maintenance” so the usual sweater or necklace just ends up as extra “stuff.” But this year, we knew the perfect thing to get our mom… mooncake molds! After all the presents were unwrapped, it was immediately on to mooncake making (our mom already had a recipe all printed out)! Since Christmas day, we’ve made mooncakes twice more, troubleshooting the recipe a little more with each batch. For the first batch, we used red bean paste from the store, but now we even make our own red bean filling too. Fair warning, these golden nuggets don’t taste like what you’d typically eat for Mid-Autumn Festival (they taste a lot better! :P) because they’re significanty healthier, making them perfect for day-to-day munching.

Totally from scratch!
Fillings: Red Bean and Walnut
Red Bean and Date

Similar to mooncakes are snowskins. Here’s some background info:

Snow skin mooncake, Snowy mooncake, Ice skin mooncake or Crystal mooncake [<–:o!!!] is a Chinese food eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Snow skin mooncakes are a non-baked mooncake which originated in Hong Kong. The snow skin mooncake was developed by a bakery in Hong Kong, because the traditional mooncakes were made with salted duck egg yolks and lotus seed paste, resulting in very high sugar and oil content. Since many customers thought traditional mooncakes were an oily food, the bakery used fruit for filling and less oil to make a mooncake with less fat. – Wikipedia

Sounds like a healthier alternative to mooncake, right? Well unfortunately most snowskin recipes use shortening. So to avoid using shortening, we decided to follow this recipe. However, the ingredient ratios were very off and long story short, I’m gonna just stick with our healthier homemade mooncakes.