The Mid-Autumn festival is fast approaching and it’s pretty much mooncake madness now. Everywhere on social media you’ll see traditional mooncakes and then there are snow skin mooncakes, ice cream mooncakes, jelly mooncakes and now, you can even make your very own raw, vegan mooncakes.
It was around 2008 or 2009, when I actually attended a mooncake workshop and learnt how to make traditional mooncakes as well as snow skin ones. At that time, we had to use the traditional wooden moulds and it was really tricky trying to get the mooncake out of it. I don’t think I ever tried making them at home because hitting a block of wood on the kitchen counter and praying hard that your mooncake will turn out beautiful was just not my kind of thing.
Fast forward to 2016 and I’m testing and developing raw vegan mooncakes every day. I’m so glad they’ve come up with modern moulds which just operate on springs - wayyyyy better. You can easily get them at the baking supply stores. I have Doraemon and Hello Kitty moulds upon the request of Mr Jazz Guitarist. Uh-huh, that’s the way he likes it, uh-huh uh-huh.
Here’s a simple recipe which you can try out and once you get the hang of it, there are endless possibilities to mooncake mayhem when you use different nut flours, seeds and fruits. My favourite was a Brazil nut crust plus a raw cacao filling and to top it all, I made a “yolk” out of pure durian flesh and no, I wasn’t yolking around.
On Merdeka day, I created a raw vegan mooncake using the colours of our Malaysian flag, the Jalur Gemilang. It was fun figuring out how to come up with natural food colouring where I used beetroot (red), turmeric (yellow), blue pea flower (blue) and homemade coconut flour (white) to represent the colours of our flag. See, even raw vegan mooncakes can be patriotic.
Here’s your chance to indulge in more mooncakes without the guilt as these are much healthier choices than the traditional ones out there :)
My ingredients are all raw, but if you’d like to use toasted sesame seeds, feel free to do so. I p-raw-mise not to report you to the raw food police. Life is way too short for that!
Green Tea & Black Sesame Raw Vegan Mooncake
Makes 5 mini mooncakes using a 50 gram mould
Ingredients:
For the Mooncake Crust:
- 1 cup of raw pumpkin seeds
- 2 tablespoons of maple syrup
- 1 tablespoon of green tea powder
For the Black Sesame Filling:
- ½ cup of raw black sesame seeds
- 2 tablespoons of maple syrup
- ¼ teaspoon of pink Himalayan salt
- ¼ teaspoon of untoasted sesame oil
Method:
Mooncake crust:
- Process pumpkin seeds in a food processor until you get a flour-like consistency.
- Stir in maple syrup and green tea powder and mix till well combined and dough-like.
- Roll out dough and divide equally into 5 portions.
- Roll each portion into 1 ball, so you will get 5 balls in total.
Mooncake filling:
- Process sesame seeds in a food processor until flour-like consistency.
- Add in maple syrup, salt, sesame oil and process more until it starts forming small balls.
- Divide equally into 5 portions.
- Roll each portion into 1 ball, so you will get 5 balls in total.
To make the mooncake:
- Flatten the ball of crust so that it becomes a flat circle. You can use a rolling pin if you like but I usually just use my fingers
- Place the black sesame ball into the center of the circle and fold up gently to enclose the filling
- Roll the ball gently to smoothen out all the rough edges
- Press the ball into the mould and release the plunger gently
- Tada! Now your mooncake is ready!
If you’re still unclear with the instructions above, refer to videos on YouTube which teach you how to make snow skin mooncakes. The method will be very similar.
Or if you’d like to attend a workshop to learn how to make raw vegan mooncakes in person, email me to find out when the next session is. My contact details can be found here.
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