Baking Adventure: Harvest Moon Festival Mooncakes 2013

Happy Harvest Moon Festival!

This year, I made my own mooncakes! I actually tried making mooncakes a few years ago, but they didn't turn out so well. Fortunately, they came out great this year and I was really pleased. These little babies are a lot of work and are very time-consuming (No wonder they cost $30-40 for a box of 4!), but the end result was totally worth it.

Here's how mine turned out. They almost look like legit bakery or store-bought ones!

Mooncake

Here's a side view:

Mooncake (Side View)

I even made mini mooncakes with some of my favorite cartoon characters!

Winnie the Pooh and Hello Kitty Mini Mooncakes

Doraemon and Mickey Mouse Mini Mooncakes

I made several different fillings too. One of my favorites was my Mixed Nut (五仁) Mooncake made with almonds, walnuts, macadamia nuts, pine nuts, and sesame seeds.

Mixed Nut (五仁) Mooncake

The Lotus Seed with Egg Yolk Mooncake was made with store-bought lotus seed paste and egg yolks. (I tried making homemade lotus seed paste last time and it didn't turn out to my liking so I opted for store-bought paste this year. :S )

Lotus Seed Paste and Egg Yolk Mooncake

And here's a cross-section of my mini mooncake with homemade red bean paste. The flavor of the red bean paste was really good, but it was a little too dry and needed more oil.

Red Bean Paste Hello Kitty Mooncake

In addition to the mooncakes above, I also made Mixed Nut with Candied Ginger Mooncakes, Lotus Seed Paste with Pine Nut Mooncakes, and Red Bean Paste with Egg Yolk Mooncakes, but don't have cross-section pictures just yet.

In total, I made 31 regular-sized mooncakes and 22 mini mooncakes! (Yikes! That's a lot!) For now, I'm not ready to post any recipes since there's still some kinks I need to work out and I don't want to give you recipes that aren't 100%.

However, below are recipes from other blogs that gave me inspiration and what I based my mooncakes on. I didn't follow these recipes completely because my mooncake molds were a different size and I couldn't find all the ingredients, but you can check them out and see if they work for you.
Aunty Yochana's Mixed Nut Mooncakes
Lynara Cakes' Traditional Lotus Mooncakes