Since I moved to US, I've more&more realized that I never really appreciated things I easily reached to enough, such as moon cakes. I used to have tons of well-packaged moon cakes at home, fancy-looking and of so many different flavors. And I used to complain quite a lot about having to consume them while they're always too sweet for me. I NEVER imagined it is so complicated to make good, authentic moon cakes.
Basically, to make your own mooncakes from scratch, you need to make some special caramel syrup for the dough, slowly saute bean paste to dehydrate them and render the filling, and last but not least to use extremely small portion of dough to wrap as much as four times of filling to achieve the cakes. The process challenged my patience in every way! I swore that I would NEVER make moon cakes after last year I first tried, but I guess one should never swear too easily lol.
While I was doing the most tedious job, aka, making mooncakes, I got to link baking to doing experiments. I'm not excellent at either, but I do learned something interestingly in common about the two.
1. Always read the recipe/protocol carefully before start; especially if it is something you've never tried, just follow every step strictly!
2. After you know the principles of every step and you're confident enough about yourself, you can add your own thoughts (creativity) into the recipe/protocol and adjust it to something that works best for you.
3. If you sense something wrong about a step, try to correct it! Things won't be fixed by themselves, and always you'll need to wait till the end result to see your total failure.
4. Take notes and learn from every time you bake/experiment. You can always learn from your experience.
5. Last but not least, presentation makes a difference!!!
Happy Mid-autumn Festival!!!
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