Traditional Baked Mooncakes

This recipe for Traditional Baked Mooncakes is from Kwong Cheong Thye with tips I gathered from experience.  Before using this recipe, I had saw from another blog that you should leave the dough for a few hours and better still, overnight.  I tried that and it turned out disastrous.  The 2 recipes were very similar except for more mooncake syrup and a little more oil in the latter so I really don't know what went wrong.  The dough was crumbly even though I added more syrup and oil.  It was impossible to roll out, not to mention wrapping the mooncake in.  After a while, I gave up and returned to this recipe.

Ingredients:

Dough
300g Hong Kong Flour
180gm Mooncake Syrup (I think 180ml will be more accurate)
60gm Peanut Oil (again I advise using 60ml)
1tbs Alkaline water

Filling
1.5kg Lotus paste (I used white lotus paste from Phoon Huat, premium quality which is not too sweet)
50g Melon seeds
Salted Egg Yolks (optional)

• Mix the mooncake syrup, peanut oil and alkaline water in a bowl. 
• Make a well in the center of the flour and pour the liquid ingredients in. 
• Using hands, mix together and knead to form a dough.  The result is a firm pliable dough, almost like gumpaste.  If you find the mixture crumbly (or dough becoming dry as you work on wrapping the mooncakes), you can drizzle a little more oil and syrup and knead again.
• Divide the dough and fillings into portions as required.  For a small 50-60g mooncake, use about 1/2 dough and 1/2 filling.  For larger mooncakes, use about 1/4 skin to 3/4 filling.  If you are adding salted egg yolks, reduce the filling by a further 10g per yolk.  Weigh the dough and filling so that you get even size mooncakes.  I was using a 125g mould.  I used 80g filling before adding 1 egg yolk.  For the skin, I used 40g of skin but I rolled the dough quite thin (as you can see from the picture) and trimmed away the excess dough at the corners during wrapping.
• Wrap the salted egg yolks in the filling and roll into a ball or square depending on the shape of the mould you are using.  Wrap the skin over the fillings.
• Dust the mould with some hong kong flour and put the wrapped ingredients in, and press firmly.  I would advise using the side with more skin for the patterns.  This will result in a nice print without the filling showing.
• Bake for 5 mins at 180-200 degree celcius.  Take out and brush with egg wash then put in to bake for another 8 mins at the same temperature.
• For egg wash, use 1 egg yolk with 1 tsp of water and 1 tsp of mooncake syrup.
• If you are using salted egg yolks, separate them from the whites, rinsing off the whites thoroughly with running tap water.  Steam for 10 mins and leave to cool before wrapping.

For the extra skin, I made some piggies filled with red bean paste.  The kids simply loved them!