Bakertan Makes Snowskin Mooncakes

When I was still a kid, I enjoyed eating snowskin mooncakes. I love the idea of how this sweet pastry is snowy white and chewy in texture. The best part about eating them is they are served chilled. Apart from having a sweet tooth, another eating habit of mine is taking drinks and desserts served well-chilled whenever possible. This applies to drinks or desserts that are usually served warm, for instance: coffee and red bean soup.

These days, there is a myriad of flavour combinations for these chilled pastries. Snowskin mooncakes are no longer limited to their snow or green coloured skins with plain lotus paste fillings. Among these emerging flavours, you can find craneberry, matcha, red wine, chocolate and ice cream (haagen daaz and swensons) snowskin mooncakes.

With some leftover white lotus paste and an unused packet of green tea lotus paste from Phoon Huat, the options were obvious - white lotus snowskin and matcha snowskin mooncakes. The white lotus paste has a smooth texture and it isn't coyingly sweet nor oily, all thanks to my fellow blogger friend - Shirley for her wonderful recommendation.

Previously, when me and my mooncake kakis had our first mooncake making session, one of my them tried making the snowskin pastry. Sadly, it failed terribly on the first attempt. There were too much icing sugar and too little flour. On the second try, the pastry worked but the taste of the overcooked flour was overpowering. My kaki had cooked the flour in a pan over a flame and it turned biege in colour, giving off a strong burnt smell that quickly filled the kitchen and living room.

Armed with some experience amassed from our last mooncake session, we were ready for snowskin mooncakes. This time round, we spreaded the flour evenly on a baking sheet and cooked it at 180 degrees C in the oven for 30 minutes. No more unpleasant burnt smell or undesirable biege colour. So, the making of white lotus snowskin mooncakes went smoothly as planned.

Next was the matcha snowskin mooncakes. Based on my intuition, I added 2 teaspoons of matcha powder to the recipe to give the pastry skin a pale greenish colour and a light matcha taste. The effect turned out well and the skin contrasted very nicely with the dark forest green matcha lotus paste filling.

For both the recipes, the ratio of icing sugar to flour used is about 1 : 1, which is quite a common ratio amongst many recipes I come cross. After tasting the mooncakes, I felt that the skin tasted a bit floury and is not as soft and chewy. My kakis and family members agreed on this too. Wonder if any fellow bakers out there have the same issue regarding the floury taste (I used glutinous rice flour). I will need to work on improving the texture and reduce the floury taste of the snowskin pastry in future.

After fiddling with my sony P&S camera for some time, I finally got an inkling of how to create a lens blur effect with it. Am pretty excited about it and at the same time amazed that a P&S camera is capable of pulling off such a trick. Well, it definitely cannot be compared to the more poweful DSLR camera though where the lens blur effect is more pronounced.

In the morning on the very same day, I embarked on another cake project - birthday cake for my elder brother, a chocolate buttercream cake. Stay tuned for updates on the coming post...