Vegan Mooncake (Nutty and Fruity Flavor)
My little story with mooncakes
I grew up in Vietnamese culture, so naturally, I ate mooncakes every Mid-Autumn Festival. During my primary school, our school made a big deal of festival. We’d have a huge contest to decorate a “five-fruit tray” (mâm ngũ quả in Vietnamese). Various fruits were decorated creatively and turned into cute animals to entertain us kids. Alongside the fruit tray, we always had mooncakes. Decorating fruits was prepared by our parents and teachers. We kids would put on little shows with singing and dancing. Honestly, mooncake wasn’t my thing back then, but my taste has changed. Now, I love having a piece of mooncakes with some green tea or coffee. It’s a perfect way to welcome autumn in a very culturally Vietnamese way. When I have kids, I’d love to introduce them to as much of our culture, cuisine, and way of being as possible.
The idea of making mooncakes was sparked by my coworker. She runs a seasonal business making and selling mooncakes during this time of year. So I thought, why not take on this project myself and make my own mooncakes, but with a twist—using plant-based ingredients? After googling and watching multiple videos on how to make mooncakes, I came up with this recipe. (I will describe how it tastes and looks like when I actually do it).
Mooncakes originate in China and many Asian countries were influenced by the Chinese culture, including having mooncakes during the Mid-Autum festival like Vietnam. A mooncake has two parts: Fillings and Crusts. Fillings would be savory or sweet (many varieties). The traditional savory fillings would be a nutty, fatty, and meaty mixture or salted egg yolk (I think the salted egg yolk represents “moon” in the name of the cake), and the sweet version could be bean paste like mug bean, kidney bean, or lotus seed. The Crusts part is more standard, the main ingredients include flour (flour No.8 or cake flour as it contains less protein so it will make the cake soft and less chewy); vegetable oil; a hint of salt; and inverted sugar (the most important one because the softness, moist and color of the cake heavily depends on the quality of the inverted sugar (in the future post, I will disclose my inverted sugar version). In my recipe, I will add peanut butter because it will make the cake softer. Without further ado, let’s make it!
Ingredients
My recipe is designed to make 10 mooncakes 100gr with 50/50 fillings and crusts, meaning 50gr of fillings and 50gr of crusts. So we need:
Crusts
- Cake flour or flour No. 8
- Vegetable oil (any kind like soy, or sunflower oil but it is better not to use a very flavor like olive oil)
- Inverted sugar
- Hint of salt
- Peanut butter
Fillings
- Nuts: Pumpkin, almond, macadamia, lotus (already baked)
- Dried fruits: Rasin, mango, berry
- Paste: lotus paste
How to make it?
The cake is not difficult to make, let’s start with the Crusts:
We mix all ingredients of the Crusts, knee well in 10-15 minutes. If the dough is too wet and too dried, add a little flour or inverted sugar/oil to adjust, and then put the mixture in a closed container, have it rest in 20 minutes. Then divide the dough into equally 10 pieces, and round them into 10 balls. Put them aside while we prepare the fillings.
For the Fillings: the idea is to use paste like lotus paste to stick all dried fruits and nuts all together. So first, we start with lotus paste.
Lotus paste: You can use dried lotus seeds or fresh ones. We need to soak the dried ones in water for a couple of hours, let them soften, and then boil them for 30-45 minutes. I usually cook them with the rice cooker with the function of cooking porridge to avoid making a mess in the kitchen. When the lotus seeds soften (you can test them by quizzing seeds in your hands), drain the water and then blend the seeds into a paste. Put them in a pan and saute the paste with a tablespoon of oil and a tablespoon of sugar (it is optional because we have the sweetness from dried fruits). Let it cool in the fridge.
Nuts and dried fruits: cut all nuts into smaller pieces and then mix them with lotus paste. Then we divide the paste into 10 equal pieces and round them into balls, similar to the dough crusts.
To wrap the fillings inside the dough, we make the dough flat, put the filling ball center, carefully wrap, and round it
To form the cake, we need a mooncake mold with the equivalent size of the cake, put the ball inside, and press it. Tada, we just make a mooncake.
To bake it, set the oven to 190 degrees Celcius in advance (for 10-15 minutes), then place the cakes, bake them in 30-35 minutes. Take them out and mist, and brush the cakes (when it is cooler) with a mixture of inverted sugar and milk (1:1 ratio). This step is to make the cake golden like everyone does. Put them back in the oven, bake for 10-12 minutes more.
