Making mooncakes

A mooncake with patterned top.

Marvellous melt in the mouth mooncakes. If you are visiting Singapore this September you are in for a treat. It's mooncake season. Shops and restaurants and even ice cream parlours are selling muffin size delicious cakes with fancy patterns moulded into the top. You can make up your own selection in pop-up mooncake shops. All one pattern and colour. Or a set of four in different colours. Some are brightly coloured, lavender, orange, turquoise, violet. The more expensive ones come in elaborate brightly coloured paper or cardboard boxes like little suitcases.

Maybe you could re-use the boxes as jewellery stores. But make sure you have removed every trace of sugar and inserted some kind of insect repellent. I one kept a xmas pendant which was made of edible material in a wooden jewellery box. Months later I found the pendant and most of the box had been eaten away!

Moon cakes are made for the autumn Moon cake festival. They are quite expensive. And extremely calorific! Like macaroons, a little goes a long way.

You can buy moulds for mooncakes. The ones I saw were carved wood. The pattern may be relating to ethical figures or symbolic of the baker or bakery name.

I bought some second hand from a lady who was moving out of a condominium block where I was renting a flat. She said she no longer made moon cakes because they were very time consuming.

Plastic moon cake moulds are cheaper and available from the Chinese equivalent of eBay, as well as from Amazon. Some versions have a false base attached to a central spoke like a pencil for pushing the mooncake out of the mould.

Some places such as the Tanglin Club are offering events where you can learn how to make mooncakes. The Tanglin Club newsletter has the event on September 6th for members and their guests. You pay $48 if a member, $58 for a member's guest, and take home eight mooncakes in a paper container. They are all the same flavour (that's a pity) with snow skin translucent outsides.

You could look for mooncake recipes in the cookery section of bookshops.

I went online to see what recipes I could find.
https://www.finedininglovers.com/recipes/dessert/chinese-food-mooncake-recipe/

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, speaker.

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