Cantonese moon cakes with coconut and lotus fillings

As I noted in my previous blog post, discovering the recipe for perfect Cantonese moon cakes was a tough project. There were all these little secrets and keys that no one talked about for some reason, but once they were figured out, this turned out to be a master recipe (published on Zester Daily) that anyone can cook from with ease.  

Granted, it does take a bit of time to assemble the fillings, but once you have them done -- and they can be made a couple of days ahead of time -- you can then start practicing actually forming the moon cakes, and you'll soon be able to knock these babies out in no time flat.

The biggest secret to making traditional Cantonese-style moon cakes is the caramel syrup that finds its way into not only the fillings, but also the glaze and even the pastry itself. When I bit into my very first successful moon cake, the caramel provided that gentle chewiness that was always missing before that.

Korean flour & Meiguilu

Traditionally, Cantonese moon cakes were made with a sugar syrup called tangqing, or "sugar green," that was supposed to be allowed to ferment for at least two or three months. An old cookbook on Chinese sweets says firmly that it "cannot be used immediately after it is boiled." Well, when I read that, I was truly dismayed because I had less than a month to crack the secret, and this was definitely not helping.

The key came in the form of a recipe I uncovered by the great Sichuan chef Chen Kenmin (Chinese name: Chen Jianmin 陳建民), as I explain in the second half of the Zester article. Chef Chen didn't talk about the caramel per se, but there were enough clues to figure it out. Then, I fiddled around with his ratio of fat and sugar to flour in order to get that super thin wrapper I so desired.

Thin, thin dough

In the end, the high amount of caramel and oil in the dough ended up making it truly easy to wrap the pastry evenly around the filling. Prior to this trial-and-error discovery, I'd always ended up with cracked dough or thick bases on the pastries. 

Before this, too, I could never get the dough to achieve that delectable degree of thinness that allows the pastry to be so crisp and yet chewy, and also offers that irresistible Chinese contrast of the soft and luscious filling. I mean, when I cut open that first moon cake that you see on the right here (it has the fruit and nut filling recipe posted on Zester), I couldn't have been prouder.

Then, when a food-loving friend from Nanjing came over for tea last week, I was still hesitant about serving him these cakes because I didn't want anyone to shatter my illusions. But my husband insisted, and the friend beamed when he tasted the first mouthful. "These are the best I've ever had," he said. Whew.

If you've tried making Cantonese moon cakes before and failed, you'll see a couple other changes here that end up making all the difference in the world. For instance, there is no leavening in the dough. Every recipe I'd consulted called for baking powder or baking soda or Chinese alkaline water (aka lye water, which is just a bad translation of jianshui) or something to make the dough rise. That was a big mistake. This dough doesn't need it at all, and in fact leavening just serves to fuzz up the pattern on the cakes because the dough, of course, rises. Leave it out and the pastry becomes crumbly and yet tender, and whatever pattern you use for your molds will remain clear.

Bitter green sprout in lotus seed

Another small difference is the butter that's used in today's recipes, in the next blog post, and on Zester. Butter is definitely not traditional -- lard is the fat of choice in old Chinese recipes -- but I am certain that if Chinese pastry chefs had had the option of using butter instead of lard, they wouldn't have hesitated for a second!

Students of Chinese will note that while both date paste and red bean paste are referred to as ni, or mud, today's two fillings are correctly called rong, which is a type of mallow or hibiscus; this is a Cantonese word often used in the names of fluffy foods, as can be seen in that old American-Chinese classic, egg foo yung (furong dan) or minced chicken (jirong). 

In addition to the dark caramel glaze on Zester, I have included one extra glaze recipe here in order to give you the option of a blonder moon cake. This is especially helpful if you have a limited number of molds alongside an enthusiastic number of fillings, because this way your lighter-colored fillings (like coconut and lotus paste) can be identified more easily.

Both recipes are enough for 10 three-inch moon cakes or 30 one-inch mini cakes.

Assorted pastry molds with rabbit!

Coconut filling 
Yerong 椰蓉 
Guangdong
Makes about 3 cups packed

14 ounces sweetened flaked coconut
¼ cup butter, softened
¼ teaspoon sea salt
½ cup powdered sugar
¼ cup coconut rum

1. Shake the coconut into a large work bowl and break apart any lumps.

2. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir. 

3. Let the filling sit for at least 30 minutes so that all the rum can be absorbed. Refrigerate until chilled, and then roll the filling into balls as directed.

Lotus, pine nut & salted yolk filling   
Lianrong songzi danhuang  蓮蓉松子蛋黃

Creamy & nutty

Guangdong
Makes about 2½ cups

6 ounces dried lotus seeds
¼ cup butter, softened
¼ teaspoon sea salt
¼ cup powdered sugar
¾ cup caramel (see Zester recipe)

3 tablespoons Meiguilu (Chinese rose-flavored white liquor; see Tips)

1 teaspoon rose water (optional)

4 ounces toasted pine nuts

10 salted egg yolks

2 tablespoon Meiguilu

1. Soak the lotus seeds for 8 hours or overnight. Drain. Place the seeds in a heatproof bowl and steam them for about 30 minutes, or until very tender. Remove from the steamer and let them come to room temperature.

Wrap the yolk with the lotus paste

2. Remove the bitter green sprout that will appear in many of the seeds. To do this, gently squeeze the seed as shown in the third photo above; if you can see a green "tongue" sticking out at you, open the seed and simply pluck out and discard the sprout. 

3. Place the lotus seeds in a food processor fitted with a metal blade and pulse them until the seeds are reduced to a fine gravel. Add the butter, salt, sugar, caramel, and 3 tablespoons Meiguilu, and then whiz them together to make a fine paste. Dump the paste into a medium work bowl; taste and adjust the seasoning. Stir in the pine nuts until they are easily distributed. Chill the filling.

4. While the filling is in the refrigerator, place the egg yolks on a ovenproof plate and sprinkle them with the the 2 tablespoons Meiguilu, as this will remove some of the gaminess. Bake them at 375 degrees for about 7 minutes to soften and cook them; this will also release some of the oils in the yolks and turn them creamier. Remove the yolks from the plate and let them come to room temperature. (If you wish, you can use the yolks as is, especially if you are using chicken eggs rather than duck eggs; they'll still be good.)

5. Divide the lotus filling into 10 pieces, and roll each piece into a ball. (Wetting your hands occasionally makes this a lot easier.) Push one yolk into each ball and then cover the yolk with the lotus filling.

Dough patch

6. When you wrap any moon cakes that have salted egg yolks in them, pinch off a half-inch marble of the dough and set it aside while you use the rest of the dough to wrap the filling as usual. Then, when you press the ball into your mold, you will usually see the yolk poking through the bottom, since it is harder than both the filling and the dough. So, use that little piece of leftover dough as a patch on the bottom, and then smooth it down.

Light glaze 

Danse danshui 淡色蛋水  

Guangdong

Enough for 20 large or 30 small moon cakes

1 lightly beaten egg yolk

2 teaspoons milk

1 tablespoon caramel (see Zester recipe)

1. Mix these ingredients together in a small bowl. Brush the glaze lightly over the tops and sides of the unbaked moon cakes.

2. Store any leftovers covered in the refrigerator for not more than a day, as the yolk will start to dry out.

Tips

You can use any type of shredded coconut you like; just adjust the sweetening to your taste.

In both of these recipes, and in the glazes too, liquors are used as the liquid. This serves to season the pastries and also to provide moisture that is easily evaporated as the moon cakes bake. If you don't use alcohol, just add a little more caramel to thin out the yolk, while for the fillings, use enough caramel instead of the liquor to bind the ingredients. Don't add another liquid, as the fillings will then be too moist.

Coconut rum is used here to heighten the rum flavor; Malibu is my favorite brand. However, you can use any other liquor here to fit your taste. 

Dried lotus seeds can be found in just about any Chinese market or herbal store. Look, as always, for places with fast turnover. Check the bag for bugs and debris. Fresh lotus seeds should appear relatively chubby with little wrinkling.

Be sure and remove the green centers from the lotus seeds before using them in any dish. This is easy once the seeds have been soaked, as they soften once they plump up and can be squeezed open.

Storebought salted yolks

Don't try using a food mill on the lotus seeds. They are much too dry. A food processor works perfectly, though.

I like adding a bit of Cortas brand rose water to the lotus paste to heighten the suggestion of roses in the Meiguilu white liquor. You can't really taste the roses -- I don't want pastries that smell like Nana anyway -- but it provides a subtle undercurrent. This is, of course, totally optional.

Shelled pine nuts can be used either raw or toasted in this recipe. I prefer toasted here for the heightened nut flavor and color contrast. Either buy the pine nuts toasted or toast them yourself in the oven or a dry wok. The main thing to look for is freshness, so check the expiration date. Store unused pine nuts in the freezer if you don't use them often, as this will keep the oils from going rancid.

This time of the year, salted yolks can be found prepackaged (without the whites) in many Chinese markets, usually in the same case as the other eggs. Make sure they are from the U.S., rather than China. Refrigerate any leftover yolks in a sealed bag and use them within a week or two. Discard any that look or smell wrong.

As the moister moon cakes sit around, the sugars in their fillings will start to gently soften the pastry dough. And that is not a bad thing. In the first day or two, these moon cakes will be nicely crumbly and buttery. But then they slowly turn ever-so-pillowy, the pastry wrapper gently conforming to the rich filling. It's all rather comforting, in some strange way.

If you would prefer the pastry crisper, just reheat the moon cakes in a 325 degree F oven; do keep an eye on them so that the moon cakes don't burn.

Store the moon cakes in plastic zippered bags. Try not to stack them up, as gravity will before long work its own magic and start to squish the cakes down. That's why commercial moon cakes always have their own individual coffins -- excuse me -- plastic indentations to keep them in shape.

Date and red bean fillings for celestial Cantonese moon cakes

This coming Sunday is the Moon Festival, or Zhongqiu jie (Mid-Autumn Festival) as they call it in Chinese. When it comes to food, this day means one thing and one thing only: moon cakes.

I've tackled the other two of the Big Three Chinese Holidays -- Chinese New Year and the Dragon Boat Festival -- and to be honest, I really didn't break a sweat when it came to those foods. I'd been making those dishes most of my married life, and not to boast, but after over three decades in a Chinese household, I probably could wrap a rice tamale blindfolded with the same ease that a Sandinista could assemble a semiautomatic weapon in the dark on a moonless night. 

But one holiday food eluded me successfully... until now, that is. 

Small & large moon cake molds

A homemade moon cake was one of those quixotic passions that poked its head up irritatingly on schedule once a year when I looked at the burgeoning displays of garish moon cake boxes in the Chinese grocery and dreaded the looming onslaught of pastries that were too sweet, too greasy, to old, and too filled with chemicals -- not to mention too too too expensive -- but which I'd have to deal with anyway because it's just part of the Moon Festival, sort of like the dreaded fruitcakes and Christmas hard candies of my childhood.

You see, I had tried one fantastic moon cake during my first year in Taiwan. The mom in my host family handed me a freshly baked coconut moon cake my very first Moon Festival, and it is one that I've never been able to forget. That was, of course, also my very first moon cake, and nothing ever measured up to it in the succeeding decades. 

It was time for all that to change.

So, this year I gave myself a self-imposed challenge: make moon cakes as good as Auntie Lee's so that Zester Daily could publish the results in time for the Moon Festival. This was not easy, and the search for this recipe has possessed me for the past couple of weeks. The problem was that no cookbook in either Chinese or English (except for the one by Sichuan master chef Chen Kenmin) had a recipe that was much help. I slogged on doggedly, though, ending up with gloppy results that even my sweets-loving husband had trouble gagging down.

Mill the skins off of the dates

What I wanted was crumbly, light, ever-so-slightly chewy cookie dough wrapped around luscious fillings. This was trial and lots of error, and I have a whole lot to tell you about the experience, but let me get to the most important fact first: these are the best moon cakes ever!

More on this subject to come over the next two posts -- plus both a back story on the Moon Festival, as well as the main recipe for moon cakes (including a crunchy, chewy fruit and nut filling called wuren) are now on Zester. For now, let me whet your appetite with two traditional fillings that are perfect not only for moon cakes, but also for any other number of Chinese sweets, as well as for Western style thumbprint cookies and cakes. In the next blog post will be recipes for both coconut and lotus filling, and the one after that will show you how to make mini moon cakes.

All of the filling recipes I've developed here make around 2½ cups, which is enough for 10 large (3-inch) or 30 small (1-inch) moon cakes.

Yum

Date paste filling with toasted walnuts 
Hetao zaoni  核桃棗泥  
Guangdong
Makes about 2½ cups

8 ounces dried pitted red Chinese dates (jujubes)

Filtered water

¼ cup unsalted butter

¼ cup roasted sesame oil

½ cup caramel (see main recipe on Zester Daily)

¼ teaspoon sea salt

⅓ cup dark brown sugar, packed

1 cup chopped walnuts

1. To make the filling, soak the dates for 8 to 24 hours by covering them in cool water. Steam the dates and their soaking water for 45 minutes until the dates are very soft. Drain off the liquid (save it for something else; see Tips). Then, run the dates through the fine holes of a food mill (or a coarse sieve), discarding the skins. 

2. Pour the date puree into a wok and add the rest of the filling ingredients, except for the walnuts. Bring the puree to a boil and then lower the heat to medium so that you have a steady simmer. Use a silicone spatula to continuously stir the bottom of the puree; this keeps the puree from sticking and allows the steam to be released, as otherwise the puree will boil and spit. 

Juuust right

3. When the puree is reduced to a thick mashed potato-like paste, continue to stir and cook it until it changes from a mahogany color to a dark reddish brown. There should be absolutely no moisture left in the paste. When it's ready, you should be able to draw your spatula down through the paste to the bottom of the pan, and the paste will stay put. (See the photo on the right.) At this point, pour it into a bowl to cool completely. (The filling can be made weeks ahead of time and covered stored in the refrigerator. If you are keeping it for longer than that, freeze it to avoid spoilage.)

4. Before you use it to fill moon cakes, check the moisture of the date paste once again. It should feel slightly oily without a trace of wetness, and it should look super glossy. If it fails any of these tests, fry it again without adding any other ingredients. (Moisture will ruin your moon cakes by seeping into the cooked wrappers and making them soggy, hence the attention to this important detail.) 

5. To toast the walnuts, place them in a cold wok and turn the heat under the wok to medium-high. Continually stir the walnuts as they toast to keep them from burning; no additional oil will be necessary. When the nuts are evenly toasted, pour them into a bowl to cool. Mix the toasted walnuts evenly into the date paste. Divide the date paste into 10 pieces and roll them into balls; moistening your hands will make this go a whole lot easier. Chill the date paste before filling the moon cakes, as it is rather soft.

Sneaking a wedge...

Red bean paste with chestnuts 
Dousha lizi  豆沙栗子 
Guangdong

Makes about 2½ cups

6 ounces dried red or adzuki beans

Filtered water as needed

4 ounces peeled frozen or fresh chestnuts

6 tablespoons unsalted butter

¼ teaspoon sea salt

⅓ cup dark brown sugar, packed

1. Soak the beans for 8 hours or overnight in a medium saucepan. Drain them, cover them with fresh filtered water, and bring the pot to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer, and then cook them until they are very soft, adding small amounts of water as needed to keep the beans from burning; cook off any excess water. Remove the beans to a heatproof work bowl and let them come to room temperature.

2. While the beans are cooking, place the chestnuts in a heatproof bowl and steam them for about 25 minutes, or until very tender. Remove them from the steamer, drain them, and let them come to room temperature. When cool enough to handle, use a paring knife to remove any bits of red skin still attached to them. Do not chop the chestnuts, but leave them more or less whole.

Chestnuts in the bean paste

3. Place the cooked, mashed beans in a wok and add the butter, salt, and sugar. Heat these together over medium-high heat, stirring constantly with a silicone spatula, until all of the moisture has evaporated and the bean paste is dark and thick. Taste and adjust the seasoning. You can add more brown sugar or even caramel (see the recipe in the Zester link) to heighten the sweetness, but be sure and cook the paste down again until it is thick and glossy. You should have absolutely no moisture in the bean paste, as this will soak into the cooked moon cake pastry and make it soggy.

4. Cool the bean paste in a work bowl and then chill. Roll the bean paste into 10 balls of even size. Distribute the chestnuts among the bean paste balls and scoot them into the paste, covering them completely. 

Tips

Pitted red Chinese dates

The best Chinese dates are found in herbal shops where the turnover is fast and the dried ingredients are at their best. Look for plump, shiny dates with no sign of insects or powder at the bottom of the bag.

Chinese dates that are pitted were done so by machines, so beware of the occasional pit or chips. The food mill will remove any lingering pieces, which is another good reason to use it instead of a food processor.

Don't use dates that have been processed or sweetened, just plain old red dates. Look at the list of ingredients to be sure; all it should read is "dates."

Chill the date paste before rolling it into balls, as this is the softest of all the fillings. Even then, bits of date paste will peek through the filling, making a marble effect, which I think is actually quite pretty. The paste is thick enough, though, from all that sugar that it will not melt even though it's exposed to the heat of your oven.

Reserve the water in which the dates steamed, as this is incredibly delicious. Drink it as is, cold or hot, or add it to other things like oatmeal or tea.

Red and adzuki beans are best at busy Chinese markets and health food stores. The fresher they are, the faster they cook.

You can mill the skins off of the cooked red beans (as with the red dates), if you wish. But I much prefer the texture of the paste with the skins on. As with all things of this nature, follow your own preferences.

Both the date and bean pastes can be easily doubled. In fact, I always make at least twice as much of these recipes since it takes just as much time to make that much as the smaller amount. The extra can be frozen for later use and makes desserts for parties a snap.