Red Bean Poppy Seed Mooncake 紅豆罌粟籽月餅
Fun fact- Tonight marks the first day of Sukkot and also Mid Autumn Festival. Both cultures use lunar calendars and both holidays celeb rate fall harvest on full moon day so some years like this year, the two align and fall on the same day.
There are not a lot of symbolic food or Sukkot that I know of. However, there are several ones for Mid Autumn Festival- mooncake is one of them. There are plenty mooncake variety depends on the region. In Taiwan, we often times put a salted egg yolk in the center- the represent the full moon. Since Sukkot also falls on full moon days, I decide to make it also a celebration symbol for Sukkot.
Red Bean Poppy Seed Mooncake 紅豆罌粟籽月餅
Yield 6 mooncakes
Ingredients
Salty yolk, 6
Rice liquor, 1 TBS
Cake flour 105g
Poppyseeds, 5g
Superfine sugar 33g
Butter 53g, at room temperature
Egg, mix well, 25g for the dough, the rest for egg wash
Salt, 1g
Dry milk, 7g
Red bean paste 30g per cake
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 300F, drizzle some rice liquor onto the yolk, and bake in the oven for about 5 minutes. Remove from the oven, set aside to cool completely.
Raise the oven temperature to 375F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Cream the butter with sugar. Add in the egg and dry milk. Mix to combine.
Sift the flour. Combine the flour and salt, then fold into the wet ingredients. Do not overfold it, we don’t want to develop too much gluten. Cover and rest for 30 minutes.
Divide the dough by 30g each. You will have some leftover dough, keep them aside for patching. Roll them into balls, one at a time slightly flatten them and place first the red bean paste then the yolk onto each dough. Close the dough and shape into a ball. If there’s any crack, use the extra dough to patch it up if needed. You don’t want any filling exposed. Repeat for the rest of the dough and filling.
Roll the dough in super fine sugar.
Lightly flour the mold, press the dough into the mold. Release the dough from the mold onto the prepared baking sheet. Brush off extra flour on the cakes.
Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and brush on a layer of egg wash. Return to the oven. Bake for another 6-7 minutes until golden brown. Remove from the oven and cool on the rack completely.
