Matcha Pine Nuts Snow Skin Mooncake

Hey boys and girls, it's that time of the year again, one of my fave festivals, the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節!  With a full autumn moon hung in the velvet night, all and sundry don their best traditional attire and celebrate the festival with handheld glowing lanterns , spending the night moon gazing and eating delicious mooncakes!

After having such fun making (and eating!) Dubai Chocolate Mooncakes last year, we decided to again make mooncakes with non-traditional fillings.  Our Matcha Pine Nuts Snow Skin Mooncake are sooo luscious: creamily sweet with the distinct hint of the grassy umami of matcha matched perfectly to the buttery nuttiness of the pine nut, all wrapped in a delicately sweet and tender 'snow' skin.  I was super pleased with this flavor pairing!

How to Wrap a Mooncake 月餅皮做法

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.

Snow Skin Custard Mooncake 奶皇冰皮月餅

This lovely hand pressed cake is a very popular recent incarnation of the traditional Chinese mooncake, the Custard Mooncake 奶皇月餅, which is actually a repurposing of a traditional Cantonese dim sum favorite, the Custard Bun 奶皇包, a sweet bread bun filled with luscious soft and sweet custard filling.  

An enterprising chef at the fabulous Peninsula Hotel decided to tuck the creamy custard filling into a traditional mooncake and created the first of these 30 some years ago and since then they have become more and more popular.  (And expensive!)  

We wanted to make some custard mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 but decided to put a twist on it and wrap the creamily delicious custard inside a delicately soft rice flavored mochi like wrapping to make Snow Skin Custard Mooncakes, or 奶皇冰皮月餅.  OMGosh...yummilicious and light as a snowflake!