Have you ever wondered how to get that homemade mooncake skin as thin and even as possible? With machines it is very easy, obviously, but when hand pressing mooncakes at home it can be quite tricky. If you're not careful you'll end up with some sides thick and some sides thin. Uggh...not a pretty sight. I know that there is a 'professional' hand method to make wrap mooncakes but my clumsy hands haven't really mastered it yet.
However, as we really love making homemade, hand pressed mooncakes, we have developed a 'cheat', so to speak, our own unique easy method of wrapping the mooncake, whether for snow skin mooncakes or traditional baked mooncakes, that produces a a thin even skin on all sides of the mooncake.
Here's our mooncake wrapping 'cheat', just follow the photos! For how to make all types of yummilicious traditional Chinese mooncakes, check out our list at the end of post.
But wait just a sec...there is one thing little thing we gotta discuss first! This is the only kinda tricky part of this process but you've just gotta push through it. You must use trial and error to figure out the weight needed for your particular dough and filling so that mooncake will just fill your particular mooncake mold. You can use the following example as a guide for the ratios of typical skin to filling ratio:
Example: For our snow skin custard mooncake 32g altogether was needed to fill a small mooncake mold. We weighed out 17g for filling and 20g for skin dough. Note that 5g of the skin dough was be discarded later as according to the mooncake wrapping 'cheat' detailed here.
Now with that out of the way, let's start mooncake wrapping! Weigh out your decided weights for filling and skin. Rolled weighed filling into a ball. Roll out weighed skin to a circular disc that is big enough to wrap around the filling ball.
Bring up two opposite sides of the skin to meet at top of the filling. Press lightly to stick skin together at top.
Fold up each of the two remaining sides, trying to keep the skin as close to the filling ball as possible and then gently press to stick skin together where they meet.
Get a pair of kitchen shears and snip off the extra skin following the curve of the filling below. Don't panic if you snip off too much here or there and a hole appears, just grab a bit of skin and slap it on the hole.
A good tip here is to do the snipping with the mooncake on a food scale to make sure that you snip off just exactly whatever your extra amount of skin is and end up with the required weight needed to fill your mold.
Weighing done, you now need to get your mooncake into a ball shape. After much disaster trial and error, we finally realized that the easiest way forward was to squeeze.
That's right, just grab that almost mooncake in your hand and very, very gently squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, etc. until the mooncake is nice and rounded. Easy peasy, amiright?
For Snow Skin Mooncake only: Roll your now round ball of a mooncake in glutinous rice flour until completely and generously covered. For the snow skin mooncake there is no need to flour the mold itself as the flour on the snow skin will prevent sticking.
For all other kinds of mooncakes dust the inside of your mooncake mold with a thin layer of whatever flour should coat your mooncake. Each time! Don't forget! You'll end up with major stuck mooncake-itus if you forget!
Another cheat we have discovered is to use a toothbrush to flour the mold. Just dip toothbrush in flour and brush inside the mold. It creates an awesomely even yet thin layer.
Drop your now roly poly mooncake ball carefully into your mooncake mold and use your fingers to press it down firmly but gently into the bottom and sides of the mold to make sure that the engraved pattern will be impressed clearly.
Time to get noisy! Knock the mold gently on table, either on one side or on the tip furtherest from you, watching for a corner to detach. Once a corner has detached you can use your fingers to help it out. Or tap gently on the back of the mold. Be careful when knockity knocking not to knock right into your mooncake by accident.
I can't tell you how many times I have accidentally smashed formerly perfect mooncakes...
There's something just so beautiful and soul warming about hand pressed mooncakes. We love making them, eating them and sharing them with friends and family. We hope that this little mooncake wrapping 'cheat' will help make your mooncake making experience that much easier and fun.
Happy Mid-Autumn Festival to all!
Mooncake Madness at The Hong Kong Cookery:
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