DIY snow skin mooncake with custard filling

Snow skin mooncake (a video recipe) for traditional Chinese Mid-autumn day. This time, we are enjoying creamy custard filling.

I am quite excited but also a little bit blue, as we will celebrate our Mid-autumn day in following two weeks. For me, mid-autumn day is the most important holiday along with the year because it is my birthday. Most people of my generation in China celebrate birthday based on our lunar calendar. When I was still a young girl, my grandma always cooked yummy dishes, make mooncakes and Sichuan glutinous rice cake to celebrate my birthday. To me, the new city of Shenzhen is familiar but also strange. I do not have any relatives here. The emotion of missing my mom, dad and grand parents is becoming stronger and stronger. And my way to help me out is to make yummy food and share with others. So I make a large box of snow skin mooncake for my husband's colleagues.

I use creamy custard filling for this year's snow skin mooncake, as I just cannot reject its smooth, milky and creamy taste. 

To make the snow skin mooncake with the best results, I highly recommend measuring all the ingredients. And there are several tips before you starting making your own.

1. To make the perfect custard filling, custard powder is necessary. It is firstly imported by some bakery stores in Hong Kong and now becomes a popular baking ingredient in Mainland China too. It can increase the milk aroma and add slightly yellow color to the filling. However if it really too difficult to find, you can skip it with some sacrifice of the taste. And if you plan to skip custard powder, using more egg yolks can help to improve the color.

2. During the whole processing, stir the liquid forcefully and keep the fire as slow as possible, otherwise the flour might be caking. After heating, continue to stir the filling for several minutes just like shown in the video until the texture becomes very fine and smooth

3. Kneading the wrapper dough is another important tip. This will help to keep the wrapper soft after refrigeration. And usually the wrapper will be slightly sticky even after refrigeration; you can coat your hands with pan-fried glutinous rice flour or ware a kitchen plastic glove.

1. In is important to coat the mooncake stamp each time before shaping, otherwise the mooncake might stick to the stamp.

2. Helpful ingredient links from Amazon for the appearance reference: water milled glutinous rice flour, water milled rice flour, wheat starch, mooncake stamp. You can try to search them in your local asian store.