HCB Chapter 285 Mooncakes
Chapter 285 Mooncakes
For Lan Xin, making mooncakes is not a difficult task. After all, as long as the filling is prepared properly and not baked into charcoal, they are all edible and each has its own flavor.
What's more, she didn't plan to make ordinary baked mooncakes. After all, she didn't have an oven at home and it was difficult to operate. She planned to make an ice skin mooncake for everyone to try.
This is much easier and simpler, and doesn’t even require the help of Chen Baoni and her sisters-in-law.
Thinking about making mooncakes tomorrow, Lan Xin soaked a pot of red beans that night and planned to prepare the red bean filling first.
It happened to be the season for harvesting red beans a few days ago, and the Lan family also planted some red beans, but the quantity was not large. Lan Qing and his brothers took some time out to go and dig them together and harvested them in two days.
The red beans in this pot were plump and bright. While Lan Xin was soaking the red beans, a sentence suddenly popped up in her mind. She shook her head and said with a smile.
"These are not ordinary red beans, they are the red beans in Huang Wei's poem..."
"What red beans are not red beans?" Hearing Lan Xin's muttering, Old Mrs. Lan who appeared in the night asked in confusion.
Lan Xin watched Old Lady Lan coming back from the courtyard and asked in confusion, "Mom, where did you go so late at night?"
When this matter was mentioned, Old Mrs. Lan glared at Lan Xin unhappily and threw the thing in her hand to Lan Xin.
"Where have I been? It's all because of this awful thing of yours. You insisted on making some mooncakes and refused to listen to anything I said."
Lan Xin looked at the things in her hand. They turned out to be two sets of shiny mooncake molds, which looked quite old under the light.
Each mold is as big as her palm, and is printed with auspicious words such as "flowers are in full bloom and the moon is full", which looks very beautiful.
Lan Xin's eyes lit up: "Mom, where did you find these mooncake molds?"
She was planning to go to the city to buy it tomorrow, but who would have thought that Old Lady Lan had already prepared it for her in advance.
"I borrowed it from my old sister. She also made mooncakes herself a few years ago, but the mooncakes were so black that I couldn't even give them away. They were all wasted."
This is also what Old Lady Lan is worried about. Lan Xin has never made mooncakes before, so how can everything go smoothly when making them for the first time?
Her older sister had thought of making it herself to save money, but ended up wasting food as she bought things and failed to do so. In the end, she had to continue buying mooncakes from the supply and marketing cooperative in despair.
"The oven is still there at her house. I've told her that you can just finish it and take it over to her tomorrow to bake." Although she was resentful, Old Lady Lan always thought about Lan Xin.
Lan Xin smiled and pulled Old Lady Lan and said, "Mom, you are so kind, but we don't need an oven. I'll make one when my house is ready. We'll make baked mooncakes next year. This time, let's make snowy mooncakes."
"How can you eat this mooncake if it's not baked? And what is a snow skin mooncake?" This time, Grandma Lan didn't understand anything.
"Don't worry, just wait and eat."
Lan Xin felt very happy at the thought of making desserts. Early the next morning, after sending Yingying and Yueyue to school, Lan Xin took a bus to the city.
As soon as she arrived in the city, Lan Xin first found Manager Huang and got the freshly issued business license and food safety certificate from him.
Looking at these two certificates that looked like award certificates, Lan Xin was so happy that she could not express it in words. With these, her tea egg business would grow bigger and bigger.
After thanking Manager Huang, Manager Huang also offered Lan Xin a bag of Mid-Autumn Festival gifts, but he was still unhappy when he saw Lan Xin refused.
"You helped me so much, but you're not happy to receive a bag of mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival. I won't dare ask you for help again in the future." Manager Huang said hypocritically with a stern face.
Seeing his expression, Lan Xin didn't believe what Manager Huang said, but she couldn't refuse either, so she reached out and took the thing with a smile.
"Thank you for your gift, Manager Huang."
I was thinking about the snow skin mooncakes, and I would have to make quite a few of them.
After leaving the bank, Lan Xin went to the supply and marketing cooperative.
The entrance of the supply and marketing cooperative is filled with mooncakes. Customers coming and going are all buying mooncakes. The entire supply and marketing cooperative is filled with the fragrant aroma of mooncakes.
Lan Xin took a look and found that the mooncakes nowadays are simple and crude. The baked mooncakes are placed in piles on several shiny wooden racks. There is a piece of paper pasted in front of each wooden rack, which states the filling.
There are four kinds of mooncakes: five-nut, red bean paste, hundred-fruit, and black sesame five-nut. Although they look very tempting, Lan Xin shook her head at each flavor. She probably only likes the ones with red bean paste filling.
So for the sake of your own taste, you have to make snow skin mooncakes in the flavor you like!
The first thing Lan Xin did at the supply and marketing cooperative was to buy five kilograms of glutinous rice flour, and then sticky rice flour, starch, and white sugar.
Lan Xin also asked, and found out that the supply and marketing cooperative didn't have corn oil for sale, let alone butter.
"It seems that I can only use peanut oil for this mooncake. I hope the taste won't be too strong."
Lan Xin had no choice but to give up and bought some oil paper, red ropes for packaging, and some other miscellaneous items.
After Lan Xin bought all the things, she didn't delay any longer and took a bus directly back to Lanjia Village. She carried the large and small bags of things to the Lan family's old house, rolled up her sleeves and started working.
Old Lady Lan was confused. "Aren't you going to wait for your sister-in-law and the others to come back and help you?"
"I'll prepare everything while I still have time. I have to make a lot of mooncakes today." Lan Xin said as she washed the red beans and threw them into the pot to cook them into a paste.
While the red beans were cooking, Lan Xin asked Old Lady Lan to help watch the fire while she went to the field and dug up some big, plump taro.
Looking at the things in Lan Xin's hand, Old Mrs. Lan became more and more confused, and felt extremely uneasy.
What is Lan Xin going to make? She said she wants to make moon cakes, and she is also using taro and sweet potatoes. Lan Xin only said one sentence to answer Mrs. Lan's doubts, "You will know soon."
"Shunzi just brought over a bucket of milk. Do we still need milk to make mooncakes?" Old Mrs. Lan said helplessly, pointing to a bucket of buffalo milk in the kitchen.
Someone in Lanjia Village raised buffaloes, and buffalo milk is a good thing, so Lan Xin asked them for a bucket of buffalo milk and was ready to pay for it, but these people ran away and said it was just a bucket of milk and they didn't want any money for anything.
Lan Xin had no choice but to let them do as they pleased, thinking of giving them some mooncakes when they were ready.
After everything was prepared, I started to process the ingredients.
First, she peeled the taro, cut it into pieces, and steamed it together with a few purple sweet potatoes. While steaming the taro, she filtered and boiled the buffalo milk to sterilize it, and occasionally stirred the red bean paste to prevent it from sticking to the bottom and burning.
Seeing that the red bean paste was cooked, Lan Xin began to add sugar to adjust the sweetness, then threw it into the wok and stir-fried it to evaporate the moisture in the red bean paste, and fried the thin red bean paste into a dough that could be kneaded.
Then Lan Xin started to make taro paste, which was even simpler. Crush the taro and purple sweet potato into paste, add milk sugar to adjust the taste, and stir carefully until it becomes beautiful and delicate light purple taro paste.
Lan Xin prepared these things, put them aside to cool, and then started to cook the salted duck eggs that Old Lady Huo Huo Lan had just ripened a few days ago.
Old Lady Lan’s salted duck eggs are a good thing. Lan Xin washed the yellow mud on the outside with water and put them in a pot to cook.
After the egg is cooked, the thick shell is cracked and the salty and fragrant white egg white is peeled off, and the orange yolk appears. It is round and looks like the rising sun, which makes people happy.
Lan Xin ate all the thirty salted egg yolks made by Old Lady Lan. Meeting Old Lady Lan's resentful look, she very consciously put all the salted egg whites into a bowl. It would be a nice side dish to serve with porridge or rice in the future.
Then Lan Xin ruthlessly crushed all the round salted egg yolks, added eggs, milk, starch, oil and sugar, put them into the pan and stir-fried them on low heat, turning the sticky mass into a golden and fragrant custard filling, which looked so tempting.
After all these things were prepared, Lan Xin spread them out to cool and began to prepare to make ice skin.
First, mix glutinous rice flour, sticky rice flour, milk, sugar and other ingredients into a paste according to the proportions. Pour it into a basin, put it in a pot, cover it with gauze and start steaming it.
Old Mrs. Lan, who was watching Lan Xin's operation not far away, couldn't help but reach out and grab her chest, it was so painful.
She shouldn't have agreed to Lan Xin's request. She asked how to make mooncakes. Which step looked like the steps of making mooncakes?
All this food has been wasted!
The old lady simply turned a blind eye and walked out of the kitchen, no longer paying attention to Lan Xin. She felt she would get a heart attack if she continued watching.
Lan Xin had no idea what Old Lady Lan was thinking. She watched the time, and when the dough in the pot was steamed, she spread it out to cool. While it was still a little hot, she poured in an appropriate amount of peanut oil and began to knead it.
Lan Xin made a lot of mooncakes this time. With 5 kilograms of flour, the dough filled a whole bowl. Lan Xin gritted her teeth as she kneaded them little by little, rubbing the oil into the dough.
After she finished all these, she was sweating all over. It was really tiring work, but the dough was finally kneaded. Looking at the light yellow, fragrant, shiny and smooth dough, Lan Xin was very satisfied.
Cover the dough with gauze and set it aside to dry. Then start to knead the cooled taro paste into small pieces of appropriate size. After kneading the taro paste, knead the red bean paste and roll them into small balls of the same size.