**The Art of Making Homemade Mooncakes**

As we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, it's a great opportunity to try our hand at making traditional mooncakes from scratch. In this article, we'll take you through the process of creating these delicious treats, and explore the tips and tricks that make all the difference.

**Preparing the Dough**

To start, we need to prepare the dough for our mooncakes. This involves mixing together flour, sugar, and lard or butter to create a smooth and pliable paste. The key is to get into all the nooks and crannies of the mold, making sure to press the ball of dough into every corner. We'll use a combination of baking powder and cornstarch to help the mooncakes rise and give them a light texture.

**Picking Up the Mold**

Once we've pressed the dough into the mold, it's time to pick up the mooncake carefully. This is where patience comes in – we need to grip the mold as if it were a hammer, and then gently knock the side of it against a dish towel to loosen the cake. From there, we can transfer the mooncake onto a piece of parchment paper.

**Misting with Water**

Before baking, we'll mist our mooncakes with a little bit of water to help them cook evenly. This also helps prevent the egg wash from burning too quickly. While they're baking, we'll prepare our egg wash – in this case, a mixture of one whole egg yolk and just a splash of milk.

**Baking the Mooncakes**

After five minutes at 325 degrees, we'll take out our mooncakes and carefully brush on the egg wash. This is where things can get tricky – if we're not careful, the egg wash will burn too quickly, resulting in a burnt or overcooked mooncake. To avoid this, we need to reduce the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake for another 15 minutes.

**The Finishing Touches**

Once our mooncakes are done baking, we'll carefully remove them from the oven and allow them to cool completely. While they're cooling, we can take a moment to admire our handiwork – after all, these are no ordinary mooncakes! To give our mooncakes that beautiful, shiny surface, we'll simply place them inside an airtight container.

**Tasting Our Masterpiece**

Finally, it's time to taste our homemade mooncakes. I was pleasantly surprised by how rich and dense they were – and the flavors were so much more complex than store-bought versions. The lotus seed paste added a delightful nuttiness, while the egg yolk provided a nice balance of saltiness. And let's not forget the golden syrup, which gave our mooncakes that signature sweetness.

**The Secret to Success**

So what made these mooncakes so special? For me, it was the combination of using fresh ingredients and taking the time to carefully prepare each step. From wrapping the dough in plastic wrap to gently pressing it into the mold, every detail mattered. And when it came to baking, I found that reducing the temperature and increasing the baking time helped create a beautifully golden crust.

**Conclusion**

Making homemade mooncakes is a fun and rewarding experience – especially with the right techniques and ingredients. By following our tips and tricks, you'll be able to create delicious and authentic treats that are sure to impress your family and friends. So don't be afraid to give it a try – happy baking, and happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engreetings my beautiful lovelies it's emmy welcome back today i'm going to be attempting to make moon cakes which are a sweet dessert confection that come from southeast and east asia and they are made to celebrate the mid autumn festival the mid-autumn festival is a harvest festival and it's supposed to celebrate the moon now moon cakes are called moon cakes because traditionally they have a salted egg yolk in the middle so when you cut the mooncake in half you have this beautiful golden cross section of an egg yolk that's supposed to represent the moon now the mid-autumn festival also known as the harvest moon is celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar and in the gregorian calendar that date fluctuates it can fall anywhere between september to early october and this year it falls on september 13th this friday which is tomorrow so i very quickly put this recipe together so i could get this video up on time so the mid autumn festival celebrates a few things number one being unity and family everyone looks at the moon and thinks of their loved ones who are near and far it's also a harvest festival it's the end of the growing season it's time for everyone to get together and to harvest the bounty of the growing season and it's also a time of reflection and prayer to wish for good things for yourselves and for others i love all those sentiments just a great holiday and like most holidays it's celebrated with symbolic food including the moon cakes now moon cakes are not traditional cakes in the western sense they're not leavened at all so my recipe is adapted from the very popular blog the walks of life and i will put the link to the original recipe down below now be warned this recipe is very labor intensive most people these days purchase their moon cakes for this reason you can buy these pre-made in a tin and usually a set of four and that can run anywhere from ten to thirty dollars it can even go higher than that depending on how many egg yolks are inside there and how many moon cakes are in the actual tin so this recipe involves making your own lotus paste you can also buy this store-bought pre-made and you can save yourself a lot of time alrighty let's go ahead and get started shall we and you're going to need 12 ounces of lotus seeds now these seeds are beautiful they come from the lotus flower inside the lotus flower once it matures and dies away there is a kind of pod so some of you that have trapophobia may not want to look at the lotus pads because they may give you the heebie-jeebies but the seeds are located in those little holes using a butter knife or paring knife we're going to split the lotus seeds open they look like little bird's beaks they're really beautiful and there might be a little green sprout in there you want to remove that because that's quite bitter then we're going to soak them with plenty of water overnight so after 24 hours we're going to drain off that water add new water we're going to boil it for 30 to 40 minutes or until the seeds are cooked they're kind of softened but they still hold their shape so now we're going to turn off the heat and allow the seeds to cool in their cooking water then we're going to drain them and now we're going to grind them into a paste the original recipe says that we should do this in a couple batches and i totally agree they just said to puree and i found that it just made this very crumbly mixture so i added some extra cooking water so that the blades could actually really process this into a paste and the final texture will look something like hummus so in a non-stick skillet we're going to cook the lotus paste that we just made with powdered sugar and oil so you'll notice the paste will get thicker and you're kind of folding and working it folding and working it and the recipe says to cook it until it kind of stiffens up but as i added more oil i found that my paste was getting very very oily and greasy so i ended up not using all of the oil i had about a third of a cup left okay so now that we have the finished lotus paste we're gonna allow this to cool before we shape them and next we're going to mix up our dough this will be the outside of the mooncake and there are two ingredients that might not be easily found at your grocery store number one being this and this is potassium carbonate sodium bicarbonate solution this is also known as lye water it is used in traditional chinese noodle making it gives it a very characteristic texture and flavor and also you're going to be using this and this is lal's golden syrup golden syrup you can probably find in the international aisle of your grocery store but the recipe includes a homemade version if you can't find this to a third of a cup of peanut oil we're going to add 140 milliliters of our golden syrup and one teaspoon of lye water add that to one and two-thirds cup of flour or 250 grams so mix this well but you don't want to over mix it we don't want to develop any gluten we don't want a tough outside crust once it forms a dough we're going to wrap that in plastic wrap and place it in your refrigerator to chill while everything is cooling off next we're going to prepare the salted egg yolks now you can find these in a few different forms if you have the kind that i have they are salted eggs and they are pre-cooked you just have to crack the shells and remove the white portion of the egg just so you have the yolks next we're ready to assemble our moon cakes but first you're going to need one of these or something like this and this is a moon cake mold so this is a traditional wooden mold that has been carved but they also have plastic ones that have a very convenient spring-loaded plunger and lots of intricate designs and you can order those ones online but my grocery store happened to have this so i picked this one up and my lovely mother after i made my moon cakes asked me if i knew what this character was and i said yeah it's double happiness right and yeah that's true it is double happiness but it's a symbol that is often used with marriage so these are actually wedding moon cakes a lot of people like to get married around the mid-autumn festival because again it's a very auspicious time of year next we're going to have to weigh out all the ingredients very specifically i use the amounts that were provided in the recipe for a 100 gram moon cake if your mold is a little bit bigger you're going to have to make adjustments for that so first thing we're going to do is take our lotus paste and we're going to roll into a ball and then make an indentation then we're going to put our salted egg yolk in the middle of that then gather the lotus paste all the way around the yolk until it disappears then we're going to set that aside and then take our ball of dough and then place it in between two layers of plastic wrap and then use a rolling pin and roll this out very very thinly and take your lotus salted egg yolk ball place that in the middle and then using the plastic wrap carefully gather the dough around the ball now we're going to take some flour and we're going to lightly dust our hands and lightly dust the mooncake then we're going to take our mold and thoroughly flour all the nooks and crannies and knock out the excess flour and press the ball into the mold make sure you get into all the nooks and crannies we're going to pick up the mold and grip it as if you are gripping a hammer then knock the side of it against a dish towel then we're going to transfer the moon cake onto a piece of parchment paper before we bake them we're going to mist them with a little bit of water then we're going to bake it at 325 degrees for five minutes while they're baking you're gonna prepare your egg wash and i used one whole egg yolk with just a splash of milk so after five minutes take out your mooncakes and then take a brush and carefully brush on the egg wash now reduce the temperature of the oven to 300 degrees return the mooncakes back to the oven and cook for another 15 minutes now keep an eye on your mooncakes we put an egg wash on top and it will brown very very quickly so once they're golden remove them from the heat and allow them to cool completely a little tip to get that beautiful kind of shiny glossy surface on your moon cakes is to take your fully cooled mooncake and put it inside of an airtight container and these turned out beautifully there are moments in this recipe where i was thinking that this might fail but the end results are absolutely gorgeous i'm so pleased let's go ahead and give these a taste to see if they taste as good as they look alrighty let's cut one open and it smells just how i remember a mooncake smelling oily sweet kind of brown sugary i don't remember eating these all that much when i was a kid and honestly i didn't really like them all that much but now that i'm older i think they're absolutely beautiful i do like them i find them very very rich and now i know why the lotus paste contains so much oil and now i remember why i just always wanted just the tiniest little taste of it because these are very very rich and dense alrighty so let's go ahead and cut this open okay here we go so my mooncake mold is pretty shallow so my moon instead of being nice and round my moon is a little bit flat but we still can see the crust on the bottom the crust on the top and we can see the lotus paste inside so i'm going to call that a success yay it looks more like a setting sun than a moon but for my first moon cake i'll take it now i'm just going to take the tiniest little bite because these are so very rich alrighty happy mid-autumn festival these are actually better than the store-bought ones i'll be honest i was never a huge fan of mooncakes as a child they were just always so sweet and dense and rich but i like these ones better i can really taste the golden syrup in there it has a really nice kind of brown sugary sweetness to it which i don't remember the store-bought ones having they just taste fresher and the flavors are just more bright the egg yolk in the middle is very interesting it's salty and has a very crumbly texture but it's very rich as well it's almost cheesy it sounds strange but it's almost cheesy it has a richness of an egg yolk but has a very crumbly texture and that salt is really nice balance to the sweetness of the bean paste that's inside the lotus seed paste is quite nice too it has a lotus seed flavor in there that i don't remember really detecting in the store-bought versions as well those ones just tasted more just like a sweet bean paste well the lotus seed paste that i made has to me a little bit more nuttiness to it it also has a little bit more texture the store-bought ones tend to be very very smooth this one has just a little bit of bite to it probably because my food processor wasn't able to get it completely ground up smoothly but i actually like that little bit of texture the skin is very nice i was very pleased at how well this worked and wrapping and how easy it was to just manipulate and to roll out it was a real pleasure to work with and i was really surprised with this mold i really did have some concern that the mooncakes would not unmold properly but they came out beautifully so don't be afraid of the wooden mold alrighty so there you have it homemade mooncakes to celebrate the mid-autumn festival i hope you think of your family and friends the next time you look at the moon thank you guys so much for watching i hope you guys enjoyed that one i hope you guys learned something please share this video with your friends it was a lot of work follow me on social media like this video subscribe and i shall see in the next one toodaloo take care bye you\n"