Living in our beautiful country allows us to experience the many different festivals of each and every race in Malaysia.
For the Chinese community in Malaysia, we celebrate Chinese New Year either in January or February and come late September or early October, we look forward to celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival (also known as the Mooncake Festival) which is also one of the biggest celebrations for the Chinese all over the world.
We end the wonderful year with Winter Solstice celebration in December.
In between those months, we have many other festivals by the other races in Malaysia to keep up with the merrymaking. Such an amazing country we are living in, don’t you agree?
Today I am going to share some history about the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival.
About the Mid-Autumn Festival
Mid-Autumn Festival existed over 3,000 years ago during the Zhou Dynasty. It was derived from the custom of moon worship but back then, it was just the emperors worshipping the harvest moon in autumn with the belief that the practise would bring them plentiful harvest the following year.
Following the emperors, appreciating the moon became popular among the upper class with music and dances during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD) while the common citizens just prayed to the moon for a good harvest.
Only during the later period of the Tang Dynasty did the common citizens began appreciating the moon together.
The 15th day of the 8th lunar month was established as the “Mid-Autumn Festival” during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) with sacrificing to the moon becoming a custom.
MOONCAKES were only eaten from the Yuan Dynasty (1279 – 1368); a dynasty ruled by the Mongols and remain as the most important food of the Mid-Autumn Festival to date.
Today, mooncakes are very much commercialised with the price continuing to trend upwards hence it is always a better option to bake it ourselves.
Read more about the history of the Mid-Autumn Festival in this article or you can head over to any Sunway Malls during the weekend for a joyful reunion!
To help kick start your mooncake making journey, I am sharing a very simple baked mooncake recipe that I learned from YouTube. Thanks to technology these days 😉
What I am sharing is the recipe for the dough. As for the paste, I used ready-made ones bought from a bakery supply stores for this tutorial.
Once you have mastered making the dough for the skin, then you can try making your own paste.
Ingredients
For baked mooncake dough:
100g high ratio (low protein) flour
60g golden syrup
30g oil
1/2 teaspoon lye water
Filling:
White Lotus Paste
Red Bean Paste
Matcha Powder
Toasted Melon seeds
Salted Egg Yolk
Egg wash:
1 egg yolk
Fresh milk
Method
- Mix golden syrup, oil and lye water.
- Add flour and mix all ingredients together.
- Cover and let dough rest for 2 hours.
- Toast melon seed until golden brown.
- Separate egg yolk from egg white and steam for 5 minutes.
- Mix some toasted melon seeds into the filling paste.
- Depending on the size of your mould, weigh the paste and dough and form into balls.
- For my 160g mould, I use 85g paste + 5g melon seed + 15g egg yolk + 50g dough.
- Place the ball of dough in between two sheets of plastic.
- Use a rolling pin to flatten it.
- Place a ball of filling paste on the dough and wrap the filling.
- Use the mooncake mould to shape the dough.
- Brush milk on the mooncake and bake at 160°C for 5 minutes.
- Brush egg wash evenly and bake for another 15 minutes.
- Let cool.
Watch this video to understand better how to make baked traditional mooncake:
