You might be surprised! … In fact, there are no special moulds or methods in encasing the heart, flower or star within the jelly mooncake !! Hehehe ! I am sure some of you would have already figured out how these are done, right !
If you have noticed my previous post on the “salted egg yolk” within the mooncake, the exact same method is used except that instead of the jelly balls now, I used some chocolate moulds and ice cube trays that comes in various shapes and replace the “salted egg yolk” with different shapes now. You may refer to the previous post here.
Here’s what I have done :
For the heart shaped, I used the chocolate mould as below. As long as you can find a suitable size that will fit into the centre of the mooncake nicely, you can use any shape you desire.
Little hearts as such are created using the above mould.
And when placing the hearts into the filling of the mooncake, please turn it upside down and place them into the centre of the filling in a standing manner. Please remember that the heart cannot be placed lying down flat, otherwise you would not be able to see the heart shape after the mooncake is cut.
This is also to ensure that the heart shape will turn out upright after it’s being removed from the mooncake mould.
The white, as you can see, does not turn out as apparent as the red hearts. So do bear in mind this when you are deciding between the colours that you want for your mooncakes. And the “red” from the filling will spread to the white hearts after placing them in the fridge for more than a day, therefore it is not advisable to pair a dark colour filling with a light colour centre.
As for the stars and flowers, I used ice cube trays as below to create the shapes.
And you get small little flowers and stars like these :
Place them into the “filling” of the mooncakes in a standing position and not lying flat, as you can see from the picture below.
Follow through with the rest of the steps in the previous post for the skin of the mooncakes as well.
And you will get these little dainties in your jelly mooncakes after they are sliced !
And that’s it ! No special method or mould required and anyone can do it !!
And oh, I received some questions with regards to the previous posting on the jelly mooncakes with the jelly egg yolk.
~ I am not sure if hoon kueh (green bean / mung bean) flour can be used to replace agar agar powder as I have not tried that before. But I believe using hoon kueh flour will yield more a Kueh-liked texture rather than a jelly texture.
– When preparing for the skin for the mooncake, if you have accidentally allowed for the first 1/3 of the skin to be set completely rather than it being 1/2 set, please poke holes using a toothpick or satay stick lightly onto the 1/3 skin (do not poke all the way through, but just halfway into it) before placing the “filling” and covering it up with the rest of the skin mixture. This is to ensure that the layers will stick to each other after unmoulding from the mooncake mould.
– Ensure that you cook the agar agar mixture till it boils and bubbles each time. Otherwise, the jelly will be very soft and will never be set.
– Always ensure you use adequate amount of agar agar for the right amount of water (1 pack =10g of agar agar powder to 1000ml of water.) You can reduce the amount of water slightly if you want the jelly to set faster.
Hope the above helps !!
Happy Jelly-mooncaking !
Thanks for the lovely recipe! I just tried. so pretty!