Snow Skin Mooncakes (Uses Olive Oil)

This year mid-Autumn festival falls on 8th September 2014.  My children love snow skin moon cakes. Most of the recipes found on the internet uses shortening as one of the ingredients. I was searching for a recipe that uses healthier oil/fats and I found Sugar & Everything Nice website that uses olive oil. Yay!!

Olive oil....Hmm...I was wondering will the smell of olive oil be too overpowering. And to my children, healthy means nasty tasting or tasteless, such as broccoli, all things green and cod liver oil. My mind went on the same track as I looked through the recipe. 

But all worries were put to rest when I opened the packet of the fried glutinous rice flour (kou fien). The flour has a nice, strong smell (in a good way - promised) and when I mixed in the olive oil, the smell was totally covered by the smell of the flour. 

So that set me thinking about the use of other neutral smelling oil, like canola oil, sunflower seed oil or even hazelnut oil, walnut oil, avocado oil and the newest healthy oil, cold press coconut oil. These all can be used in this recipe! 

The flavors consist of raspberry snow skin with crushed freeze dried raspberry, green tea snow skin and one that used food grade bergamot (smell of earl grey tea) essential oil. 

The moon cakes skin is made with all natural ingredients without trans fat and the skin stays soft even on the third day. These should be kept refrigerated in an air tight container and to be consumed within 2 days, as these are made without any preservatives. 

Snow Skin Mooncake (makes 10 - 50g mooncakes)

Adapted from Sugar & Everything Nice

Ingredients:

79g  Fried glutinous rice flour (or kou fien), a little more to dust the mould

94g Icing sugar

21g Olive oil

105g Water

Flavorings: 

(It is to make 1 piece of the particular flavor. Just multiply the amount by the number of pieces that particular flavor you are making)

1/8 tsp of green tea powder (green tea snow skin)

1 drop of bergamot food grade essential oil (bergamont flavored snow skin)

1 tsp freeze dried raspberry powder, crushed (raspberry snow skin)

Organic Raspberry powder

Fillings:

150g white lotus paste/black sesame lotus paste/ any paste you have at hand

50g melon seeds

  

Directions:

• Sift the flour and icing sugar and set aside.
• Add olive oil and water to the dry ingredients and mix with a fork, until a rough dough is formed.
• Transfer the dough to a work surface and gently knead with hand.
• Divide the dough into 30g portion for each moon cake.
• At this point, you can portion out the amount needed to make the different flavors and mix in the flavoring. 
• Mix lotus paste with the melon seeds and portion into 10 balls of 20g each.
• Flattened 30g of the skin dough and wrap the skin dough over 20g of lotus paste mixture.
• Dust the surface of the moon cake with the kou fien and place into the mould to form the moon cakes.
• Chill the formed moon cakes for 1 hour and enjoy!!
• Consume within 2 days as the moon cakes contain all natural ingredients without any use of preservatives.

To be in the loop, click 'like' on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/incookiehaven?fref=nf