Baked Mooncakes 2012

For myself, I always prefer baked mooncakes, compared to snowskin ones. I always find the snowskin too sweet for my liking. The lotus paste itself is already pretty sweet, snowskin, well, has high sugar content too.

These are the baked mooncakes I did. I also made some piglets. The mooncakes are single yolk ones, as I am not a yolk fan and it's high in calories and cholesterol. As for the piglets, they are only 35gms each and contain no filling.

Well, for the coming weekends, I SHOULD be making some agar agar mooncakes.... if i really made them, I'll definitely be posting the pics. :P

stacking them up, like in an angry bird game

The back view is so cute. lol

Snowskin Mooncakes 2012

Prices of mooncakes have been steadily climbing these few years. Personally i think it's really crazy when i look at the prices charged per mooncake. Although I know sometimes, certain hotels or restaurants have some secret recipes that produces really good tasting mooncakes. But since I have learnt about mooncake making, i find it silly to pay so much.

Every year, I would make some mooncakes for my mom. This year, I seemed to have started really early, all thanks to a visit to the baking supply store and seeing that lotus paste was already on sale at such an early date. Knowing myself, if i were to wait till nearer to Mooncake Festival, I would be procrastinating so much to buy the ingredients, and then having such a tight timeline, I would also end up not being able to finish up the pack of lotus paste.

Enough of my ramblings.... This year, I tried a new snowskin recipe, shared by a friend. Using olive oil, instead of shortening, the skin remained soft even tho' taken straight from the fridge. Not to mention, olive oil is a much healthier option then shortening.... presenting my strawberry snowskin mooncakes with cranberries and melon seed lotus paste filling.

Happy and Prosperous Year of the Rabbit!

Following last year's tradition, (well,I made these last year, so I made this again this year, is this the start of a tradition? LOL) I made 2 pairs of these huatt kueh, 2 for my mom, 2 for myself.

Here's wishing everyone a good year ahead... HUATT AH!

2011 CNY bakes - Chocolate Cornflakes Clusters

CNY bakes up for orders

I finally got my CNY bakes orders up! I know it maybe a little late now, but well, I'm only baking limited quantity anyway.


So here you go:

Pineapple tarts... comes in a nice container.

Malted chocolate chips cookes.

Sugi cookies.

Grandma's Kuih Rose

Drop me an email, thefiendbakes@yahoo.com.sg, if you're interested to order, k?

Mooncake 2010 - Baked Walnut Mooncakes

These mooncakes are also known as Shanghai Mooncakes. This recipe yield really yummy mooncakes, a definate keeper! This is the 2nd time I've made these and this time, I halved the recipe.

I adapted LeeLee's recipe (Thanks Lee!) and made some modification to it as I do not want to be left with 1/2 an egg and I do not have shortening in my pantry.... I got 13pcs from the recipe listed below.

What you need

• 190g Plain flour
• 12g Custard Powder
• 1/4 tsp Sodium Bicarbonate
• 25g Icing sugar
• 135g Butter (salted)
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla paste
• 1/4 tsp Ammonium Bicarbonate
• 1 Egg
• Walnut for decoration

What to do

• Cream sugar, butter, vanilla paste and ammonium together until slightly white. (slow speed first then change to high speed)
• Gradually add in egg.
• Add in sifted flour, custard powder and sodium bicarbonate to knead into a dough. Be careful not to overmix. Leave dough in fridge overnight or for a few days.
• Take out dough from fridge and divide into portions of 30 gm each.
• Divide fillings into about 40 gm each.
• Wrap fillings into dough and round it up. Decorate with walnut at 4 sides. Apply egg glaze (from SunLik, can be used to glaze traditional baked mooncakes too) and bake at 160ºC for 10 mins. Take it out and leave it for about 10 mins and apply egg wash again. Bake for another 15 mins.

Mooncake 2010 - Traditional Baked Mooncakes

I've made use of the long weekends to bake some mooncakes. Last year, I did not have the time to bake these, and made snowskin and agar-agar ones instead. It made me realise that I still prefer and appreciate these old-school baked mooncakes.

I had been using Florence's recipe for mooncakes and as usual, I used it again this year. It's a good, no-fail recipe. Thanks Florence, for your generous sharing.

I only made single yolk ones as I'm no fan of salted egg yolks, but since I'm giving some of them away as festive gifts, having a yolk in them makes them more presentable. :P

Here's the mooncakes... I LOVE the mold. Special thanks to Elyn for bringing them in!

There was leftover dough and filling, so I made a piglet and use the cookie cutter to finish up the dough.

It's just round the corner....

Made pineapple closed tarts but this year, i decided to do it tangerine style.

The pastry is oh-so-melt-in-the-mouth that I have a hard time wrapping the tarts, all thannks to the very warm weather we're experiencing lately. Even after baked, the pastry was very soft. However, it was well received as the family love the melt-in-the-mouth texture.

As busy as a bee...

As usual the weekends came and went in a flash. During the weekdays, I'll look forward to the weekends, with an ambitious list of to-bakes. However, when weekends actually arrived, I tended to take things easy and ended up making only a tiny dent in the to-bake list. This seems like an re-occurring (vicious) cycle in my life, at least for now. :P

Anyhow... nephew asked me last weekends if I intended to make kueh rose, popularly know as beehive in my family. It is a very well received snack in the family and I guess there's no escaping from making these. So I got myself all prepared with the ingredients, only to know later that nephew was not coming to visit my mom in the weekends, meaning I'll be left to make these myself. Thankfully my niece did come by and she helped me to finish these up.

After standing at the hot kitchen for 2 whole hours, these are what we got. *happy dance*

So much to do, so little time...

I know... I deserved it.. all due to my procrastination, I'm left with only 2 weeks for my cny bakes. The coming 2 weeks will definately be crunch time... as I have in mind a whole (long) list of cny to-bakes!

To start off the baking frenzy, I baked some kuih balu. I bought the cheap stainless steel molds a few years back, and I do remember attempting this bake but the mold was disappointing as the kuih balu stuck on it even tho I had greased and floured them. Furthermore, the design of the mold was not defined when baked. Until recently I spotted a recipe by Sinner. Her kuih balus looks so good! and this is a favourite snack of mine, and my little one... so I decided to give the mold another chance. :P Well, this time I followed Sinner's instruction to grease the mold... the kuihs still got stuck. However the recipe yield great kuih balus... so good that the family finished it in 1 afternoon, and I had doubled that recipe.

Not wanting to give up, I bought the same molds as Sinner in a recent trip across the causeway. I was glad that I bought these molds... they were going for RM8.90/pc. At a baking supply shop west of Sg, these molds are selling for SGD9.80! This is how the mold looks like.

Thanks to Sinner's sharing.... I tripled the recipe this time, reduced some sugar, and added chocolate rice; and this is the recipe:

What you need

• 3 eggs ( I used 60gm eggs)
• 85gm castor sugar
• 90gm plain flour
• 1/4 + 1/8 tsp baking powder
• vanilla extract
• a handful of chocolate rice

What to do

• Preheat the oven at 190 degrees. Also, place the molds into the oven to heat them up.
• Sift the plain flour and baking powder together, set aside.
• Whip eggs till foamy, add in the castor sugar, beat on high.
• Add in vanilla extract, continue to whip eggs till ribbon stage.
• Fold in sifted flour mixture into the whipped eggs.
• Add in a handful of chocolate rice and fold into the batter.
• Take out heated molds, spray PAM onto it.
• Scoop batter into mold, till full.
• Bake for 10mins at 190degrees and remove with skewer onto cooling rack.
• Cool completely and store.

2nd round of agar agar moonies

After trying the agar agar moonies I did earlier, my mom said she loved it. So I kinda promised her I'll make her another set of moonies.

Was trying to think of new flavours for the outer skin and finally settled on Ribena and Osmanthus tea. Quite refreshing and happy with the colours. :)

The leftover fillings I added pandan paste to it and managed to get 2 mini ones.

Agar agar moonies

Finally I made these mooncakes . It's quite a long process (tho' not tedious) to make these as you need time to set the agar agar part by part. 1st you start with the egg yolk portion. I let it sit in the fridge for 2 nites as I can't find the mojo to continue with it. But being a weekends today, and I was idling at home, there was absolutely no excuses not to complete the whole process.

I bought the egg yolk jelly mold 2 years back, and never got to actually use it coz I was too lazy. It was still in its original shrink-wrap when I took it out 3 days ago! LOLz.

Thanks to Elyn for trying out the recipe, modifying it and finally posting it online. She mentioned that the final mooncakes were rather soft, so I upped the agar agar portion just a tiny little bit. Still, I found that maybe more can be added to achieve that crunchiness I love in agar agar.

Besides the pandan flavour, I made them in yam flavour too.The mini white ones were left over agar agar cutout from the white "fillings" and I added an egg yolk in each of them too.