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.

Bread Exploration

Last week in Breakfast Bread class we made chelsea buns. I personally don't like raisins and not much about cinnamon, I barely touched them.  Good that my brother is a big fan of raisins and he helped finished the buns for me.

I barely had a taste of it from the teacher's batch. The texture is good, I just don't like the raisins.  However since I don'tlike raisins I skimmed in the process and it turned out not having enough.

I have decided to twist the recipes to make something I like, or I think I will like.

There is an asian bakery at First Markham Place who make these gorgeous shredded pork buns. Asian (Singapore?) dried shredded pork strands are rolled into fluffy Japanese dough. Maybe I can try using the chelsea bun dough and create a savory version of it.

So here it is, my version of shredded pork bun with seaweed and dried shredded --- fish. Yeah, I asked grandma to give me a bit of her shredded pork to test my recipe and I didn't realize she gave me shredded fish. It's more powdery but it's actually better to use for this recipe as the flavour combines better I can imagine. 

How did the buns turned out? Hmm, still need a lot of improvements.  I could have used bread flour instead of all-purpose.  It's more of a test to see how strong all purpose flour is in Canada.  I came across the Chowhound forum noting that Canadian flour has in general  higher protein than US flour. Skeptical about the argument I switched the bread flour in this recipe for all-purpose.  I think I still will prefer using bread flour instead of all-purpose, as these buns turn out a little bit cakey. I have also tested the cake yeast/dry yeast conversion method from baking 911. It suggested the formula of [(cake yeast) * 0.32 = (dry yeast)]. It turns out pretty good. I will continue to use this for my bread class recipes as they always provide cake yeast.

I will refine the recipe and try it out again.  Regardless of the flaws from the test the buns still taste great, just a bit too crunchy on the outside. Hope I can get the recipe right soon!