3 New Mooncakes for The Harvest Moon
Chocolate & Chestnut Cantonese Mooncakes, Thousand Layer Mushroom & Salted Egg Mooncakes, and Princess (Moon)Cakes
Have You Eaten Yet? Here’s THREE new recipes from my kitchen to yours that I hope you’ll love! For more recipes, you can pre-order my next cookbook, Chinese Enough, or purchase Mooncakes and Milk Bread for all things Chinese Baking!
Hello hello! Cheers for making it to the weekend!
The days have felt extra long this week and I’m very much looking forward to keeping my laptop shut for a bit. The garden needs an Autumn refresh, some cabbage seeds need sprouting, and I have some fresh sourdough and butter with my name on it. I do have mooncakes made and friends to share them with to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival so I’m feeling pretty accomplished on that front.
Mid-Autumn Festival is next Tuesday (September 17th) so you have plenty of time to make your own mooncakes or acquire a tin of them from your favorite Chinese bakery or market if you’re planning on celebrating. I’m also having some friends over for dinner and making sure we all gaze up at the big Harvest Moon together from the garden.
I love traditions. But not in the sense that I have to do something the exact same way every single year. I think of them as markers of the passing year, which is very helpful for me because I’ve always struggled with the lack of seasons where I live. I host a Lunar New Year Party in the winter, wrap joong in the spring, and make mooncakes at the start of fall for Mid-Autumn Festival.
Ever since writing Mooncakes and Milk Bread I’ve decided to develop new mooncake recipes every year, just to keep things interesting and the inspiration flowing. This year’s mooncakes are so good and fun! Dare I say, they take the (moon)cake?
Introducing the New 2024 Mooncakes!!!!!
Chocolate and Chestnut Cantonese-style Mooncakes | ok, this might be a bold statement, but I think this is the best mooncake I’ve ever developed. It’s made in the same style of a Cantonese mooncake, which are what I primarily grew up on. They typically have a thick cookie-like crust and a dense, beany-ish, paste-like filling. Here, the crust includes cocoa powder which obviously gives it a rich chocolatey flavor. I may or may not have sneaked a few bites of the raw dough because it has the exact same appeal of raw brownie batter. The filling is chestnut puree (you can buy this at speciality grocery stores or online… or cook your own chestnuts!) that I cooked down with sugar and oil, much like how you would make a red bean or white lotus paste. The texture is fudgy and remarkably similar to a traditional mooncake but tastes like an amazing brownie! Oh, and there’s a chunk of chocolate in the center as a little melty surprise. I sent one home with my cousin to give to my parents in Ohio and my dad is obsessed with these.
Thousand Layer Mushroom and Salted Egg Yolk Mooncakes | I dread using the word “hack”, but I figured out the easiest way to achieve the look of thousand layer mooncakes and I’m really excited about it. This is a cross between a savory Suzhou-style mooncake (often stuffed with pork and salted eggs) and a Teochew-style thousand layer mooncake (super flaky with a sweet filling). The filling features a salted egg yolk in the center that is clad in a deeply savory shiitake mushroom mince (reminds me of a tiny wellington). The thousand layer crust is made from rolled up puff pastry, specifically my Chinese Puff Pastry from Mooncakes and Milk Bread (included the PDF recipe below!). I tested the technique with store-bought puff pastry and the swirled layers weren’t as defined, but still tasty if you want to go that route. My Chinese puff pastry is modeled after the traditional oil and water dough used for making flaky Chinese pastries like the Suzhou mooncakes, but layered in a more traditional European fashion, so you get these extra crispy and distinct layers. You can use this same puff pastry technique and stuff it with a sturdy red bean paste or similar filling too!
Princess (Moon)Cakes | These are for people who want a little more cake in their mooncakes. I’ve had the idea of cakey mooncakes for a while but it wasn’t until I asked my community on Instagram to help me develop a new mooncake recipe that I was inspired to make a princess (moon)cake! Taking inspiration from Scandinavian princess cakes, which are the domed and colorful marzipan wrapped cakes with layers of jam and whipped cream, these are mini cakes wrapped in mochi with dense (but in a good way) vanilla butter cake layers and jam. They are like intricately stamped petit fours!
If you’re looking for a baking project this weekend, these mooncakes are waiting for you. There’s a mooncake for everyone, so just take your pick!
Happy almost Mid-Autumn Festival and have a great weekend!
Chocolate and Chestnut Mooncakes
makes 12 (75g) mooncakes
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