I am not so fond of making oriental dim sum, because they tend to be very sticky and time-consuming. But they do have some advantages that their Western counterparts can't beat—for instance, they're easier to make, you don't need a lot of tools or an oven, they can easily be made gluten-free, the shape can be small and cute.

Lately everybody is working on mooncakes, so I also decided to give it a try. Since it's my first time, I bought a mix, hoping that it would save me some trouble. Unfortunately, they're not as good as I thought. The recipe was somehow inaccurate as well, which made my mooncakes not very good-looking, and I felt a bit embarrassed to present them to my friends. However, success comes only after many failures. I guess next time I should make them from scratch to make better mooncakes.

Yields 18
Ingredients
200g Ice Skin Mooncake mix
40 to 80g cold water (add slowly while stirring. I added all the water in one go, which made the dough too soft, but I didn't have any extra mix on hand!)
30 vegetable shortening
540g red bean paste, pineapple, strawberry, orange, honeydew and ground lotus-seed fillings
some cooked rice flour to use on the countertop (I substituted corn starch that I had microwaved for 2 minutes)

Directions
1. Add water to the mix and knead well. Add shortening. Knead until smooth and set aside for half an hour.
2. Divide the dough into 20g sections.
3. Divide the filling into 30g sections and roll all sections into balls.
4. Press the dough flat in your palm, add the filling ball, wrap well, and roll together into a ball. Press into the mooncake mold.

Tips
All the ingredients and molds can be purchased on Taobao, the best place for shopping if you don't have time to run around to find this and that!

Sichuanese native Annie blogs about her adventures in cooking vegetarian meals, adapting recipes from around the world. This post is her translation of the original, Chinese-language version, which can be viewed here. Photos by Annie Chen.

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