Nutty cranberry sausage mooncake

Yes I think it is time to start posting again. Finally completed my cookbook and it is with my editor right now. Time to breathe normally again. So it’s Mid-Autumn festival again, how time flies when we are busy but no complaints,  just complete “Thankfulness to God” for enabling me to do all these in this lifetime.

My family loves the nutty mooncakes with chunks of chinese sausages laced with the sweet aroma of rose water. I can’t remember when was the last time I have indulged in a good one. I guess, instead of wasting money buying and trying, I have decided to make some myself. I made some 2 years ago and they were completely gone within a day. I had to make the 2nd batch the next day. Let me share this recipe with you and hope you can find the time to make it. Enjoy and have fun. Be warned … it involves quite a lot of work.

approximately 12 mooncakes

Ingredients

Mooncake pastry ingredients

600 gm organic all purpose flour
50 gm cornflour
1 cup olive oil
300 ml homemade dark sugar syrup – 500 ml water, 200 gm caster sugar
(dark sugar syrup can be replaced with store-bought treacle)

Ingredients for the filling

2 cups chopped walnuts
2 cups chopped almond
2 cups chopped dried cranberries
1 cups of chopped candied wintermelon
1 cup of diced chinese sausage

Binding agent for filling

3 Tbsp of olive oil
1 tsp sea salt
4 Tbsp rose water
3 Tbsp glutinous rice flour
3 Tbsp icing sugar
light soy to taste
a little hot water (to bind)

olive oil (to oil the moulds)
plain flour (to flour the moulds)
2 egg yolk (as egg wash)

Method

1. Fill a saucepan with water and pour sugar into the centre of the water in the saucepan. Low heat, cook until the sugar turns dark brown. Brushing the insides of the saucepan from time to time with a brush soaked with water to avoid the sides burning. When the syrup has turned dark golden brown pour into a glass bottle to cool. This is best done a few days or a week in advance to allow the syrup to mature. This syrup is used to color the mooncake pastry.
2. In a large metal mixing bowl, combine all mooncake pastry ingredients evenly. Add enough oil to the dough to give a soft but not shapeless dough. A smooth dough good enough to mould.
3. Divide dough into 100 gm balls and set aside on a baking tray covered with a damp cloth or cling wrap. Let them rest for an hour.
4. Bring a saucepan of water to boil. Drop in the chinese sausages. Let it boil for 3 – 4 minutes. Fish out the sausages and remove and discard the sausage skin. Cut sausages into the same size as the rest of the ingredients.
5. Roughly chop the almond, walnuts, cranberries and wintermelon. Combine all the filling ingredients together in a large metal bowl.
6. Mix all the binding agent ingredients into a thick paste and scrape into the nuts and berry mixture. Combine all the ingredients for the fillings evenly with the binding agent paste.
7. Weight the mooncake fillings into 80 gm balls  and place them in a baking tray. The weight of each ball filling is dependent on the size of your mooncake mould. My moulds are 100gm of mooncake pastry each. If the mould is smaller, less fillings are needed. This you will have to try it out yourselves.
8. Roll out a ball of mooncake dough and place a ball of fillings in the centre and wrap the into a ball. Carefully place the wrapped mooncake into the oiled and floured mould. Gently press firmly on all sides and turn the mould over and knock the mould at a slant on both sides then centre, to remove the shaped dough. Practice makes perfect.
9. Place the shaped mooncakes on a prepared baking tray and pop them into a pre-heated oven at 170 degrees celsius for 10 minutes.
10. Slide the mooncake tray out and brush egg wash all over the mooncake to give them color and pop them back into the oven 5 minutes or until it looks golden brown with an “eat me” aroma escaping through the oven.
11. Remove from baking tray and cool the mooncakes on a wire cake rack. Baked mooncakes are best consumed after 3 days.  This gives the crust time to absorb the oil from the fillings making them soft and flavourful. They can be refrigerated or frozen for later consumption. If you intend to freeze the mooncakes, I suggest they are wrapped in in foil and then cling wrapped for storage.