The Wonderful Mooncake Tau Tsar Pneah

I accidentally made tau tsar pneah! And I'm not kidding at all.

Today, after a day out of the oven, my failed mooncake tasted even more like tau tsar pneah. For the uninitiated, tau tsar pneah is a type of round, Chinese biscuits with flaky skin and grounded mungbean filling fried with shallot oil, I think.

Mine was baked, with oats filling. The skin was not flaky but it wasn't as hard yesterday when it just got out of the oven. It was crispier hard yesterday, but today, it was crispy nice. The oils must have had time to seep into the skin, I guess. Else god pitied me.

I actually set out in the attempt to make my own mooncake. The thing is, if this is your first time baking mooncake, ideally you should follow the recipe to the dot. Well, me being my ambitious self, decided to improvise.

First, I had the wonderful thought to try my hand at creating a sugarless mooncake, but of course without spending extra on getting some sugar replacement products. Sugarless means not using sugar at all.

Secondly, I didn't have any beans to make the paste filling and was too lazy to slog away over the stove to prepare the filling. So, instead, a bulb lighted up in the crazy head and I got the idea to substitute the beans with oats, with flavour, of course. The health conscious me chose green tea.

Finally, I missed read the instruction to prepare the skin. Reading it again, I realized most of the recipe called for the dough for the skin to sit and sleep for hours, not minutes. I only rested mine for a mere half an hour!

No wonder it failed. The skin came out to hard. The thickness was of course way off, as I really cannot estimate well the amount of dough and filling I should prepare. I decided to just use up all and not have any leftovers, so everything went in, nothing wasted.

No rolling pin also made it slightly inconvenient to flatten the dough properly. I used a glass, the only one in the apartment, which was not even a straight cylinder. It was a sexy glass, with curves. Rolling tough dough with a sexy glass was stressful. Too soft, the dough won't flatten out, too hard, well, the glass might just break, right?

Since this was the maiden attempt, well, I didn't bother to even get the mooncake mould. No one would even guessed what I used to make my mooncake. Get ready for it, the cut out base of a mineral bottle! Yup, that's right! I actually cut out the bottom portion of a small mineral bottle, about an inch from the base and used that to mould my mooncake. There were some marks for the patterns, but nothing fancy like intricate designs in proper mooncake mould.

I managed to get 5 small mooncakes. And when I had finished mould them, I didn't think that it would fail so badly. I knew they might have slightly thicker than normal skin but it didn't cross my mind that the skin on the five was going to be crunchy hard!

The first 10 minutes I was actually still optimistic. It was towards the second half of the baking process that I knew it was going to fail. The dough started to increase in shape and then I could see the skin getting crispier. Then later, the base of the mooncake dough cracked open, spilling out of the filling. That was when I knew, this attempt failed.

Trying out the first piece was like having hard tau tsar pneah. And the taste was bland. Very bland. No green tea. Nothing. The filling tasted, well, very oatsy! As I was struggling to finish the mooncake, my mind cringed at the thought of this was only the first!

This morning, I had my second mooncake tau tsar pneah for breakfast. It was a pleasant surprise. Like I mentioned earlier, god must have pitied me, thus making the mooncake tau tsar pneah, the outcome of my mooncake experiment gone horribly wrong, tastes better. In better, it means, bearable! My wonderful accidental creation, Mooncake Tau Tsar Pneah!