Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Like many others, I too joined in the mooncake frenzy. This year though, I did not bake any traditonal mooncake. Just made some simple snowskin mooncakes with red bean paste. Added in lots of toasted pumpkin seeds which really enhanced the taste. :) I added green tea powder and some essence to make into green tea, pandan and strawberry snowskin. But felt that the taste was not obvious enough, should have added more..so these are only good for home consumption, though my mum's friend who didn't like mooncakes liked this red bean as it was something different from the usual lotus seed pastes she had eaten. :) :)

The snowskin recipe was obtained from Zu's blog - Quick 'n' Easy Treats. I like the texture and it's a simple recipe. Here it is:

Ingredients:

• 75g glutinous fried rice flour (kou fein)
• 90g powdered sugar
• 33g shortening
• 75g cold drinking water
• 1/2 tsp condensed milk
• Vanilla essence or other flavours that you fancy
• Colorings of you choice
• Any paste of your choice (red bean, lotus, green tea, etc)
• Salted egg yolks, steamed on an oil plate for about 5-10min (optional)

Method:

1. Sieve flour and powdered sugar
2. Add shortening and mix them using rubbing-in till you get crumb like texture
3. Add water, condensed milk, essence and colouring, mix well until it forms a smooth dough
4. Set dough aside for at least 20mins
5. Make the fillings into ball shapes of 28g inclusive of yolk if you are using (note: this really depends on the type of mould you are using and the thickness of the skin you want it to be). I would advise you try out one first to get the right proportion.
6. Divide dough into small portion each 22g
7. Flatten dough to wrap up the fillings
8. Seal up dough to enclose filling completely
9. Roll the dough in fried glutinous rice and sprinkle some of it in the mould for easy releasing.
10. Press into mould and knock the mould to loosen the mooncake

Makes 12 mini mooncakes

After the red bean paste were finished, i still had some dough left. In order not to waste it, I came up with my own version...peanut mooncakes! I mixed some peanut butter with crushed peanuts, and ...yeah there comes my peanut mooncakes. I made it much shorter or it becomes a mini bite-size one. I quite like this, it tasted just like peanut mochi...