Baymax Snowskin Mooncake

It's the time of the year for making mooncakes again, actually still a little early to Mid-Autumn Festival, but I see them popping out in stores already and was tempted to start. I first tried hand moulding snowskin mooncakes into characters last year and I've been waiting for this year to try out more designs. :) You can take a look at the designs I did last year here.


I made a few characters on Tuesday, and the first character I'm sharing for today's post is Baymax. Love how easy it is to make him, lol. For the benefit of my readers who aren't familiar with mooncake, mooncake is a traditional Chinese pastry, eaten during the mid-autumn festival. The one I'm sharing today is a spin-off from the traditional baked mooncake and it's called snowskin mooncake. There is no baking involved, it's heathier and it's really easy to make. Snowskin mooncake is a little like the Japanese mochi.


I made two designs for Baymax, I only showed the steps to make the simpler one. For the full body version, I added fillings for both the head and the body, the hands and legs are just moulded using the snowskin. I'm using back the same snowskin mooncake recipe I shared last year, it's the simplest I've found. Not the tastiest recipe I've tried but still acceptable. Feel free to substitute with your own recipe.


The mooncakes were filled with passion fruit paste. I did not make the paste from stratch, the paste was store-bought. I remembered a few people asking me where I bought the paste last year. My reply then was I would not recommend the shop I bought from but I would recommend them to get the paste from Kwong Cheong Thye instead. This year the paste I'm using is from Kwong Cheong Thye, they have quite a few interesting flavours, in addition to the traditional ones.


Hand moulding the mooncakes does take a little longer than using a mould, but these Baymax ones are still relatively fast to make, as compared to the other characters I've yet to share.

BAYMAX SNOWSKIN MOONCAKE

Ingredients:
150g Gao Fen (cooked glutinous rice flour)
150g Icing Sugar
50g Shortening
180g cold water
1/2 tsp charcoal powder
Mooncake filling - I used green tea white lotus paste

Method:

1. Sift Gao Fen and icing sugar together in a bowl.
2. Add in shortening to the mixture and combine. 
3. Slowly add in the cold water, you might not need to use all. You can stop once you are able to knead into a dough. Take out 1 small portion of dough and add on 1/2 tsp of charcoal powder, add on more charcoal powder if needed.  Knead till colour is evenly mixed. Cover with cling wrap and let the dough rest for 10 minutes.

4. Weigh white dough and fillings, I used 30g of fillings to 25g of dough. Flatten dough with rolling pin, roll fillings into a ball and place on top. 

5. Seal and wrap mooncake using your hands. Mould into oval shape.
  
6. Take some dough, mould two hands for Baymax. This step is optional, if you want it to be even simpler, you can leave out the hands. 

7. Using black dough, mould two circles for Baymax's eyes. For his mouth, you have to roll out some dough using your hands till you get a long thin strip, then cut to the required length.