Traditional baked mooncake

I had a great time baking Chinese new year cookies at the start of the year. For someone who is still new to baking, I was very interested in making traditional cookies and snacks (because I love to eat them so much!). So in one of my impromptu visit to Phoon huat, I bought the ingredients for making mooncakes. After much procrastination, mainly due to me going to work full time now, I finally found a weekend night to do it. ^^

Before doing it, I actually spent quite some time watching various YouTube tutorials posted to get an idea how to wrap the mooncakes etc. and also reading up on many bloggers' recipes and blog entries to understand the process and what are the important steps to achieve successful mooncakes. The recipe below is adapted from Happy Home Baking - traditional mooncake.

Ingredients
Dough
100g Plain flour
70g Redman sugar syrup
2ml Alkaline water
25ml Peanut oil

Paste
I used ready-to-use green tea lotus paste (420g)

Note: This recipe will yield 12 mini mooncakes (50g)

Recipe
1. In a bowl, add in the sugar syrup and and alkaline water. Mix well before adding in the oil. Ensure that the mixture is well mixed.
2. Put the flour in a mixer bowl. Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the mixture of sugar syrup, alkaline water and oil. Use a spatula to mix gently and well incorporate the flour to form a soft dough.
3. Wrap the bowl with cling wrap and leave in the fridge for at least 2 hours or overnight. (Due to space constraint in my fridge, I transferred the dough to a smaller container and cling wrap for exactly 2 hours.
4. Divide the paste into 35g portions and roll them into small balls. Set aside.
5. After 2 hours, remove the dough from the fridge. Flour your hands and give it a few kneads before dividing them into 15g portions.
6. Put one portion of the dough on one side of a piece of cling wrap. Flip the other side up (like how you close a book) and then use the rolling pin to spread the dough evenly into a circle.
7. Gently remove the dough from the cling wrap and put the filling in the centre. Wrap the dough around the filling and ensure it is fully enclosed.
8. Dust the dough with some flour and place it into the mooncake mould. I shaped the dough to make it elongated so that it can fit in the mould without touching the sides. If you put the round dough in, the sides might get cut to expose the filling. Press firmly on the tabletop before lifting to release the mooncake. (Mine is the press and release type of mould).
9. Place all the mooncakes on the baking tray lined with baking paper. Spray some water on the top of the mooncakes to prevent cracking.
10. Bake the mooncakes at preheated oven 180 degree celcius for 10 minutes. Then remove from the oven to cool down for 15 minutes. The cooling down step is very important and should not be skipped.
11. Do an egg wash for the mooncakes before returning the mooncakes to the oven to continue baking at 180 degree celcius for 15 minutes. Watch over the mooncakes for this second round baking as it might brown earlier than the stipulated time depending on the oven!
12. Remove from the oven and let it cool down completely before storing them into air-tight containers. Do not try to taste the mooncakes at this point as they are not ready. It will take 2-3 days for the mooncake skin to soften and only then it will be ready to serve!

I am very happy to see the mooncakes nicely done. Yeah it is another tick off my cooking checklist! The wrapping part reminded me of making pineapple tarts except that I find that mooncake dough is even harder to wrap. I think I definitely need more practice to improve on that. If you are not confident to wrap like me, I would strongly recommend using the cling wrap and rolling pin method to roll out the dough before moving on to wrapping. Try not to roll it too thinly and lightly dust the dough with flour before you start rolling. It will make wrapping a less stressful step. :) I shall be patient to wait and try my mooncakes in another 2 days!