Sleepless Travels Reloaded

My mom’s birthday is always around the time of the Chinese mid-autumn festival (actually it’s Spring in Australia…). She loves mooncakes, and this year she requested mooncakes as her birthday cake! \*0*/

I got the recipe from my aunt, but I’ve never heard of half the ingredient list, but more importantly the instructions are as vague, unclear and as downright misleading as you can get D:

Good thing I could call up my aunt for further clarification … but not so ‘nice’ to keep calling right?

So I kind of muddled my way through >_<

And then!! My rolling pin went missing and no one could find the wooden mooncake mold!!! \*o*/
Luckily one person in my cell group had a mooncake mold - plastic, but can't complain.

And then for some reason the dough is sooooooo elastic (I think it's because I refused to use alkaline water - the chemicals in it sound so scary o.o) that it just bounces back to its original shape after awhile. So even though I used a mold, it just ends up looking like shapeless lumps anyway D:

There are lots of other mistakes which I won't bore you with, but I think I know what to do next time >:|

The mooncakes I made are ng ngan (5 seed) mooncakes. It’s a filling made out of nuts instead of lotus seed paste. It’s actually a traditional filling but for some reason most people haven’t heard of it before and think I am making up weird shit :@

There are walnuts, sesame seeds, pepitas (melon seeds), almonds and cashews. There’s also kat baeng (candied mandarins) and tong dong gua (candied winter melon). It’s a delightfully light and crunchy mooncake and is not as oily or filling as a traditional lotus seed paste one (yar, and you use HEAPS of oil for lotus filling mkay!)

My favourite filling is the dong gua :D. I toasted it so it’s so nice and crisp and crunchy >_<

Because I didn’t have any carbonate/alkaline water in the dough, it didn’t rise at all!! So the skin is not soft >_>
It’s crunchy/hard like a cracker.

Also did you know the skin is so dark because they put in black sauce? And other seasonings I normally associate with savoury “normal” food >_>

Anyway no black sauce so I had to use lots of egg wash to brown it up. Otherwise it would have been a white mooncake!

It’s actually not bad. I quite like it. But maybe I shouldn’t call them ‘mooncakes’ eh? Yar. They are now henceforth called ‘Evane’s Special Nutty Biscuits’.