Our China

Making Mooncakes: The Sequel

September 13, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Last year about this time, I wrote a post about our adventure making mooncakes from scratch.

In case you are not familiar, mooncakes are the Chinese equivalent to Christmas fruitcake, and they are given and passed around during the Moon Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival, according to the lunar calendar.

People either love or hate mooncakes, and we are actually yet to find a Chinese person who says they love them, but our kids do! Giving mooncakes is a big social obligation, and people spend lots of money choosing the right mooncakes, both according to the quality of the cakes inside and the box that contains them.

Last year, we tried our hand at making our own from scratch, and I posted a link to a recipe from an expat forum that worked well for us. That was the only record I kept of the recipe for my own use. Today, getting ready to take on a friend’s challenge to make not only the pastry but the filling as well, I discovered the recipe had vanished from the internet!

I was really distressed until I remembered the Internet Wayback Machine and was able to recover it. So that it won’t be lost to me or future generations of mooncake-makers :P I’m going to repost it here. The original recipe was posted by Robynne Tindall at eChinacities.com. What follows is entirely copied from that original post, now lost in cyberspace, except that I have extracted the filling recipe. Many Chinese actually don’t enjoy the filling from traditional mooncakes, viewing them as too sweet. I’m trying this filling recipe this year:

The essentials

The main ingredients for the pastry are low-gluten flour (低筋面粉), sugar syrup (转化糖浆), alkaline or lye water (枧水) and vegetable oil. Although it may seem like an unusual ingredient, the alkaline water gives the pastry its soft, slightly fluffy texture and helps it to brown evenly. As for the fillings, you can either purchase them ready-made—particularly the red bean and lotus seed pastes—or, if you’re feeling up to it, you can mix them yourself, which is particularly easy if you have a food processor.

You will also need a mould to make the mooncakes. Traditionally mooncake moulds were made of wood: you’d press the dough-wrapped filling into the mould, leaving a traditional design on the cake, often signifying good health and happiness. Today, mooncake moulds are generally made of plastic and come in a range of designs, from floral styles, to Hello Kitty and even Angry Birds (thanks globalization!). Mooncake moulds can be purchased on Amazon.cn or Taobao for around 20-30 RMB each.

Where to buy

Although they aren’t used in everyday cooking, all the ingredients for both the mooncake pastry and the filling should be available in larger supermarkets such as Walmart, Carrefour and Wumart. As mid- to high-gluten flours are more common in China, if you can’t find low-gluten flour you can still substitute all-purpose flour without altering the texture of the pastry too much.

A wide range of baking ingredients is also available on Taobao, for example from the Ziwei Baking Shop, which also has a physical location in Beijing.

How hard is it to make your own mooncakes?

Overall, making your own mooncakes is not as hard as it first appears. The pastry comes together fairly easily and is not nearly as temperamental as Western-style pastry. Your mooncakes may not look as uniform as shop-bought ones, but therein lies the charm of home baking.

The hardest part is wrapping the mooncakes, due to the low ratio of pastry to filling. However, it does get easier with practice. This website has a handy video showing you how to do it.

Recipe: Traditional mooncakes with lotus seed paste and salted egg yolks

Serving size: 12 mooncakes (approx. 50 grams each)
[Note: I found this to be inaccurate, makes far less]

Ingredients:

100g plain flour; preferably low-gluten (低筋面粉)
60g golden syrup (转化糖浆)
½ tsp alkaline water, also known as lye water (枧水)
28g vegetable oil

Egg wash:

1 egg yolk
2 tbsp egg white

Instructions:

1. Using a large bowl, mix the golden syrup, alkaline water and oil well. Sift in the flour. Use a spatula to combine all ingredients. Don’t over-stir. Knead until the mixture forms a dough. Cover with film wrap and rest for 40 minutes.

2. Mix the egg yolks with the wine. Wipe dry the yolks with kitchen paper. Cut each into two halves. Set aside.

3. Roll lotus paste into a long tube. Cut into 12 equal portions, each 35 grams. Roll each portion into a ball shape. Set aside.

4. Preheat oven to 180 C (356 F). Prepare the egg wash: whisk the egg yolk with the egg white.

5. Divide the dough into 12 equal portions. Roll each portion into a small ball. Cover a dough portion with film wrap and roll into a thin disc. Then take a lotus paste ball and poke a hole in the middle with your finger. Place an egg yolk inside. Roll and shape into a ball. Wrap and seal the lotus paste ball with the dough disc.

6. Spray the mooncake mould with flavorless oil and place the stuffed mooncake into the mould. Lightly press the mould handle, then remove the mooncake from the mould. Transfer the stuffed mooncake onto a lined baking tray. Repeat this step to finish the remaining dough and lotus paste.

7. Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 to 12 minutes. Brush the mooncakes with egg wash about 5 minutes before removing from the oven. Continue to bake until the pastry turns golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool on a wire rack.

8. Store in an air-tight container. The pastry will become soft—(回油), literally meaning “returns oily and soft”—and shiny in one or two days.

English?

August 12, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Although I lived in Hong Kong for a year when I was 18 years old, it was still hard to prepare myself for what to expect when we arrived in China for the first time. One thing that surprised us was how much English was everywhere—from signs on stores to labels on products we buy in the stores to clothing—there is English everywhere.

Or something like English.

The most mystifying thing about this “English” is why it’s there at all. There aren’t an overwhelming number of expats in China. Recent stats put the number at somewhere just south of 700,000. In a country of between 1.3 and 1.4 billion people, that’s a drop in the bucket! And while we live in an excellent city with tons of amenities, it isn’t anything like Beijing or Shanghai where foreigners are everywhere. Most cities are like our city. Beijing and Shanghai, though admittedly big, are the exception, not the rule, when it comes to foreign presence.

And it isn’t as though, by and large, the Chinese population is conversant in English. Certainly, the standard of English is gradually rising, but let’s just put it this way: don’t get lost in China and depend on your English to help you find your way home again.

Nevertheless, it’s extremely common to see English words emblazoned all over the place. A friend explained it to me this way: English is associated with things classy, things elite or things special. Perhaps much like North Americans would treat something with French written on it.

That being the case, it’s further mystifying why someone wouldn’t take the time to get it right. We’ll often see shirts with a bunch of English words on them, few having any relationship whatever to the ones adjacent to them. Here’s one that almost got it right–I think–although I’m not at all sure what the intent might have been:

And here’s another–a sign advertising a new apartment complex being built in the heart of the city. Apparently, there is “inner peace in the flourishing” (!?!)

When I ask my friends who do speak English well about this phenomenon, they don’t seem to see my point. Even our Chinese teacher, whose English is very good, will wear a T-shirt with nonsense written on it. I suppose it’s no different from the phenomenon of “Westerners” sporting Chinese characters as tattoos:

Bad Chinese Tattoo — Photo source: kitalove.com

Yes, something like that. Only less permanent. :)

It’s Genuine!

August 7, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Shopping here is almost always an adventure. Often when we shop, there’s some doubt about whether or not the item we’re buying is genuine.

However, sometimes the doubt is entirely removed for us. We were pretty sure the following items were NOT the real deal. But you be the judge.

We bought the baking soda pictured below at the local box store–a rough equivalent of Costco without all the fun stuff and samples:

And my son spotted this box in our local market. Something’s not quite right, here, methinks:

Our China: The Crack of Dawn

July 22, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

When we first arrived here, as the initial jet lag was wearing off, we quickly concluded that more than our internal clocks were askew. The time itself was wrong.

Instead of greeting dawn at nearly 6:00 a.m. as we had in Toronto, the sun streamed into our room (and our children’s–they were 6, 4, and 2 at the time) at 5:00 or so. It didn’t help that there were just thin curtains in the kids’ room, and the bedrooms were on the east side of the apartment.

What was the reason for this disorienting dawn? Turns out, China has no time zones.

Take a look at China on the map.

This isn’t a small country. There should be time zones–if China operated like other countries. Apparently, the story is that there once were time zones, but they didn’t work, so they were abandoned. So what happens instead is the culture of the places changes. In the west of China, people get up late and go to bed late. Here, people wake up early–a market in our neighbourhood opens at 4:00 a.m.–and go to bed early.

Here’s a picture out our bedroom window at 4:30 a.m.

I won’t show you a picture of 10:00 p.m., because it would be too dark. All the lights are off (and there isn’t an abundance of streetlights, either).

In the summer, there’s little need for anyone to tell us what time it is if we wake up early. We don’t even have to open our eyes. Because around 4:30, the chirping of the crickets rises into a crescendo just prior to being drowned by the hum of cicadas. Then a man somewhere on the mountain sings out loudly with a Tarzan-like yell. (It’s a thing. People do it here. We don’t understand why.)

No alarm clock necessary. (Not that anyone in their right mind would set an alarm for 4:30 a.m., but you get my point.)

So if I’m yawning while I write this post (after 10:00 p.m., I might add, ours the only lights in the neighbourhood that are on), you’ll excuse me, right?