Here’s a look at how to make a Matcha Snow Skin Mooncake with Red Bean Filling in time for Mid-Autumn Festival 2021.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar and this year’s celebrations start on September 21, 2021.
It’s a time of harvest and reunion when family and friends gather together to enjoy the full moon and to eat a special treat called mooncakes.
Mooncakes resemble the full moon and are typically filled with ingredients such as egg yolk, nuts, lotus seed paste and various kinds of bean paste.
I decided to try to make my own mooncake and went with my two favourite Asian flavours: Matcha and Red Bean.
Here’s a look at how to make Matcha Snow Skin Mooncakes with Red Bean Filling.
What is Snow Skin?
Snow Skin mooncakes are no-bake versions of traditional mooncakes and are served cold.
You’ll find that the outer skin is quite like mochi because both are made with glutinous rice flour.
Where to Buy Ingredients
The three flours needed to make Snow Skin mooncakes are: glutinous rice flour, rice flour and wheat starch.
I was able to buy all of these at my local T&T Supermarket and these products are very affordable being around $1 per bag.
For the red bean paste, you can get uncooked red beans from T&T or you can even find cooked red bean paste there in the refrigerated section.
I used Matcha powder from Tea Parky but you can get it from a local tea merchant or online.
The mooncakes I made are also lactose-free as I used Natrel 3% lactose-free milk.
Where to Buy Mooncake Mold
I purchased a 2 Set Mooncake Mold Press from Amazon which makes mooncakes that are either round or wedged and weigh about 50 g each.
The set was expensive being $21 CDN but I bought it anyways in order to make the mooncakes in time for the Mid Autumn Festival.
The cheaper route would be to buy them on Ebay or on Alibaba where sets could be as cheap as $3 – $5 but you would need to buy them several months ahead of time since it takes a while for those products to ship from China.
As for this mooncake mold kit, I found the round mold worked better than the wedge one.
The round mooncakes came out cleaner while the wedged shaped mooncakes were not as perfect around the sharp corners.
How to Make Matcha Snow Skin Mooncake With Red Bean Filling
When I researched online for recipes on how to make Matcha snow skin mooncakes, I found a number of different recipes and methods.
However, there were two recipes that I found that best explained the process and both recipes were very similar to each other.
Both posts have videos to demonstrate the process which was helpful for me.
When I was making my own mooncakes, I referred to both recipes for the wrappers.
However, I found was that with my own ingredients and process I made less than what was noted in the recipes.
- Mykitchen101 – Matcha (Japanese Green Tea) Snow Skin Mooncake
- China Sichuan Food – Snow Skin Mooncake-Video Recipe with Custard Filling
As for the Red Bean paste, check out this recipe by China Sichuan Foods.
When I made it, I was just going by feel but essentially you need to soak the beans overnight, blend them to a consistency that you want (smooth, chunky) and then I slow cook the mixture on the stovetop to dehydrate it and get it to a paste-like consistency.
You also add sugar to your liking.
All in all, it was a fun and easy process to make these Snow Skin Mooncakes.
Next year, I’ll have to experiment with other flavours and combinations. Until then, happy eating!
This recipe was published September 2018 and updated September 2021.