The Backstory
The Mid-Autumn festival is celebrated in most Asian countries at the Autumn Equinox. Many cultures have various celebrations that coincide, such as the Jewish celebration of the “Festival of Booths,” also known as Sukkot. The full moon that occurs at the Autumn Equinox is known as the “Harvest Moon.”
In most Asian countries, Mid-Autumn festival is celebrated by eating mooncakes. There are a few different styles of mooncakes, and the most common one is the Cantonese style that is stamped with a beautiful design.
Making Mooncakes
This was my first year making mooncakes at home, and I discovered that there are many different recipes for the outer dough and inner filling. I chose to make a “Snow Skin Mooncake,” which consists of a Japanese-style mochi for the outer dough. Instead of the traditional red bean filling, I went with a Taiwanese pineapple filling. The Taiwanese love their pineapple cakes!
I bought a mooncake press because it seemed easier to me than the traditional wooden mooncake mold. They come in a few different sizes, of which I bought the largest. (A smaller one would extend the fun of pressing out more mooncakes.)
We had such a great experience that, a few days later, I made another batch of wrapper and filling to bring to our homeschool coop. It was the first time hearing the folk tales and eating mooncake for the coop families, and all the kids did a fantastic job! It was considerably faster and easier for me to prepare the ingredients the second time, too.
I found that the mooncake press makes a very beautiful cookie press for any structured cookie dough, so I plan to use it for more than mooncakes! The same afternoon that I made the mochi wrapper, I had made a traditional mooncake wrapper that ended up being too dry and unusable. The next day, I was able to restore the dough but decided to use it for cookies. I love having multipurpose kitchen tools!
Mooncake Links
If you’d like to teach your kids about the Mid-Autumn Festival and try your hand at making mooncakes, these are the books that we liked, the tools that we used, and the recipes that I had success with!
If you try a different type of mooncake wrapper, filling, or press, I found this “Essential Mooncake Guide” that includes the proper ratios of wrapper to filling towards the bottom of the page. For the snowskin type that I made, the ratio an even division between the weight of the wrapper and the weight of the filling.
I hope you had as much fun with this as we did!
Happy Trails,
Jamie