Happy Mid Autumn Festival

It's mid autumn festival today! This festival is all about getting together with your family and friends. And being a Chinese festival of course it has to do with food. The moon cake is probably the most symbolic food to celebrate this special day.

Years ago I tried making moon cake once and it was quite a disaster. The result was so bad that I truly believe I have no talent at all when it comes to Chinese cakes and pastries. I found that Chinese recipes are quite difficult to understand. Either the ingredients are very specific, or the descriptions are very generic and relative.  Knowing the language does not mean you can understand recipes.

Maybe there is hope. I finally found a blog with step by step photo instructions to these beautiful pastries, and my first attempt was a success! There are rooms for improvement of course but I am so excited and happy with the results. They taste so good that I need a lot of self control to stop myself from devouring one each as dessert for both lunch and dinner. Not bad for a newbie right?

Sweet Potato Mochi pastries (地瓜麻糬酥餅):
My version of moon cake for the year 2011. Pastry wrapped with purple sweet potato mash, mochi (Japanese rice cake) and yolk of half of a salted egg. I used ghee (clarified butter) for the pastry and it gives the pastry the flakiness and wonderful aroma. The mochi should wrap nicely around the yolk but it kept sticking to my fingers while sliding off to a side, and thus the yolk is lopsided. I have since made a second batch by making the mochi individually in mini silicon muffin cups and they were a success.