Mooncake making

I had my first time hands-on experience in making snowskin mooncake during lunch activity at the office this afternoon. It ended horribly. Haha.. The process is actually quite simple but the end results vary. Everyone in my team happened to have 0 experience even for cooking in general. Thus although we were following the instructions (i.e the process), we could not tell if our result was correct.

The first step was mixing the powder with a bit of water, coloring, etc. We had to mix with hands and this was the beginning of everything that went wrong. I could not get the whole mixture smooth. The texture was still rough and clumpy as if the ingredients were not successfully mixed. Even the colouring was not smooth and the snowskin ended up with specks of colours instead of a nice homogeneous colour. I did for one mix and another colleague did for another colour but our result was similar. The other team, however, managed to get a smooth snowskin with even colour. Everything was the same except and the result was completely opposite just because one was done by a mom experienced in cooking and the other was done by single guys with zero cooking experience.

Well I blame the plastic gloves. Haha.. In order to maintain hygiene, we were given plastic gloves to do the mixing. It was 'leceh' to mix with plastic gloves as the gloves often got stuck to the dough and I had to pause to readjust the gloves. Basically I could only see but not feel what I was mixing. Perhaps that was the other difference as for the more experienced team, they knew noone in the right mind will cook with plastic gloves on.

After the dough was mixed, we put some into the plastic mould, put in the filling, put some more dough on top and then pressed everything in the mould. I pressed and smacked the mould so hard hoping that everything would gel together nicely and magic happened in the mould. Then came the most hilarious part: taking out the end product. Our team's was stuck in the mould and the mooncake could not come out. Hahaha...Again I used brute force by smacking the mould so hard and when the mooncake was dislodged, it was not as mooncake. The snowskin cracked and simply fell apart while the filling remained as a clump in the middle. Basically we failed to make it into a mooncake as in the end it was still separate snowskin and filling. We were laughing so hard as it looked more like lontong than a mooncake.

The other team was successful so we shared their mooncakes. The skin did not taste nice but the fillings were nice. I specially chose the flavours: milk tea and durian and they were good. We did not have the time to cool or freeze the mooncake but it was pretty decent.

This lunch activity was under my QI workgroup so I was worried if people would find the activity lame and a waste of time. I am relieved and glad that people were having fun laughing. I personally enjoyed it for the experiential aspect as well. Never would I imagine trying making my own mooncake. After failing, I sort of appreciate the exorbitant prices of the mooncakes out there.