Butter Cookies 牛油曲奇饼

Ling's out of town to attend our friend's wedding.  Didn't bring along the kids as the elder one is preparing for her year end school exam.

My god daughter misses Ling very much, no mood to do almost everything (eat, play, watching TV, playing games, etc). 
Decided to bake some cookies (oopssss ~~~ me baking the cookies hehehe ~~~!) to cheer her up.  She was happily prepared and worked on the recipe of the cutout butter cookies which I promised her earlier.

We were not satisfied with the 1st bake (over baked though we follow the instructions).  Thank God, she still could joke about it :  " eehh, we added cocoa powder into it?! (knowing her mood wasn't "sunny")

As she has to attend a tuition class, I decided to prepare for another round of dough which some should be ready by then her class ends.  She helped to mold some reminding dough, made a little dice using the last bit of dough. 

She's alright after dinner and chat with Ling.
Overall, she likes the cookies (especially the Minnie Mouse) and we managed to take some photos.  

Little J specially requested to mold these cutie bears for him, he ate quite a lot of the cookies.

Mid Autumn Festival ~ 中秋节

Today is Mid-Autumn Festival.  I didn't manage to join the kids for carrying lanterns down at the park, but I managed to get 2 lanterns for my god-daughter and god-son.

My Melody - Shavonne

Little Bear - Jayden

Apart from making the homemade snowskin mooncakes this year, we had received several mooncakes.

Let me share with you those mooncakes I received over the past weeks.

Homeamde Snowskin from --- Connie



Homeamde Snowskin from --- Diana

Other gifts from --- JL and other friend

2nd "workshop" on Snow Skin Mooncake 冰皮月饼

After the 1st trial of making the snow skin mooncakes, Karen's colleague shared another recipe with her.
We made pandan flavour snowskin mooncakes today, using this new recipe.  The taste and texture were much better, nicer than the 1st trial we made. 

Most of us like this recipe best as the taste were nicer.
We bought some new "character prints" and they turned out great too, some prints were not visible ~ sigh!

 

We even tried in on "egg" & "konnyaku" moulds!   LOL ~ it works!

Click here for more images on flickr.com (some not too visible on its print)

Snow Skin Mooncake 冰皮月饼

Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) is traditionally celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month and it's the 2nd most  important festival after Chinese Lunar New Year for Chinese people. 

Getting the traditional mooncakes or snow skin mooncakes are rather costly from the various bakeries.

Our good friend, Karen had an idea to hands on the snow skin mooncakes, so we went to Phoon Huat and get the necessary ingredients after browsing through several online recipes.

For the 1st trial, we referred to Amanda's recipe. Thanks Amanda, it's really easy with simple steps.  A friend of mine, Nicole made good mooncakes, she gave a tip to add a small drop of banana essence and it's really tasted good.  Thanks Nicole. 

We had a small workshop at Karen's place, it's fun!  We 'charaben' the traditional mooncakes using our bento tools and filled them with red bean & lotus paste.