Mooncakes (月饼) 101

This is a simple introduction to mooncakes, the star pastry of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.

Traditional mooncakes are baked with either lotus paste or red beans filling. They can round or square, and the crust is stamped with the manufacturer's logo, auspicious Chinese greetings or names of the ingredients. Salted egg yolk is usually included to counter the sweet taste of lotus paste or red beans, but you can choose to go without.

The traditional method is just to put in the whole salted egg yolk into the filling. It is very crumbly when you cut the mooncake, so some pieces have more egg yolk than the other. To counter this, some manufacturers now mash the egg yolk and add it as a layer, so that each cut piece of mooncake would receive the same amount of salted egg yolk, and also provides a "cleaner" look {see pic above}.

A variation of the traditional mooncakes has flakier crust, like the yam mooncake. I think walnut mooncakes {love!} fall into this category too. The skin is more crumbly and has walnut pieces. The filling is still traditional lotus paste with, or without, salted egg yolk though.

To keep up with the modern times, and to diversify to attract all kinds of tastes-buds, there's a whole plethora of mooncake flavours now. Yam, durian, chestnut, matcha etc. Most of these creative contemporary flavours are found in snow-skin mooncakes.

Snow-skin mooncakes (冰皮月饼) do not require any baking at all. It is relatively easy to make and I made it a few times with my mum before {Hello Kitty types, real cute!}. The skin is just cooked glutinous rice flour, sugar, shortening and flavouring wrapped over a filling. Again, the manufacturer's logo, Chinese greetings or name of the ingredients is stamped on the top... or, it can be molded into cute cartoon characters, flowers etc designs. Because it's not cooked, it has a shorter shelf-life than traditional mooncakes and needs to be refrigerated.

Manufacturers really like to go wild with the flavours and colours of snow-skin mooncakes! There's fruit flavours (e.g. strawberry, lychee, apple, lime), dessert flavours (e.g. chocolate, cream cheese, tiramisu, marshmallows), nutty flavours (e.g. hazelnut, pistachio), liquor flavours (e.g. rum, Singapore Sling).... you get the idea :)

There's also ice-cream mooncakes, or jelly mooncakes like the ones I made here. Nowadays, with healthy-living being the focus, you can also find low sugar or sugarless varieties.

Depending on the quality, and manufacturer, mooncakes can range from about $2.00~$15 a piece. So there's one for every budget and as mentioned above, every flavour you like! If you are in Singapore {or HK, Malaysia, China... but I'm not sure if they have the exotic flavours though heh} you must try one!

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