Easy Snow Skin Mooncake Recipe with Peach and Marzipan

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I’m a few days late, but happy Mid Autumn Festival! The Mid Autumn Festival is a major Chinese holiday and one of the big customs during this festival is to eat mooncakes. Most mooncakes that I see sold in Chinese bakeries near me are the Cantonese style. They’re molded into intricate designs and baked to a golden brown. However, recently I’ve been seeing more and more snow skin mooncakes on social media! They’re a type of mooncake that is made from steamed rice flour. And if you know me, you know I am very well versed on steamed rice desserts. After reading many many snow skin mooncake recipes, I’ve crafted a simplified one that is perfect for beginners. I stuffed mine with store bought marzipan and some peach bites to make it extra easy, but I’ll leave you with more filling options below!

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What is Mid Autumn Festival?

First off, let’s just do a brief background on Mid Autumn Festival. This holiday is celebrated on the harvest moon, or the full moon that is closest to the start of fall. Because it’s based on the lunar calendar (because… the moon…), the date of Mid Autumn Festival is different on the Roman calendar from year to year. Generally, it’s usually sometime from September-October.

As a celebration of the harvest moon, the themes of this holiday include gratitude, family, the fall harvest, and moon viewing. It’s kind of like Asian thanksgiving. And although this holiday began in China, it was passed on to other Asian countries like Japan and Korea. You can read more about the Mid Autumn Festival here.

Mid Autumn Festival in Japan: Tsukimi

In Japan, the holiday of the Mid Autumn Festival is known as Tsukimi. Tsukimi literally means moon viewing. Looking at the full moon is a popular activity during this holiday, as well as eating moon-themed foods. Although Japan doesn’t really have mooncakes like China, they do eat a treat called tsukimi dango, which is a round white rice cake dessert that resembles the full moon. As part of celebrating the harvest moon, it’s also popular to eat fall harvest foods, like pumpkin, sweet potato, and chestnuts.

Snow Skin Mooncake vs. Mochi?

So now that we know about this moon viewing holiday, let’s get to the treats: mooncakes! There are many types of mooncakes, but they all consist of some sort of carb-heavy wrap stuffed with a dense filling. Snow skin mooncakes have a wrapper made from steamed rice flour. A lot of people put sweet fillings like red bean paste inside.

Does this sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds a LOT like daifuku mochi! The key differences between snow skin mooncake and daifuku mochi is that mochi typically is made from only sweet rice flour, whereas snow skin mooncakes use a mixture of different rice flours. Traditional daifuku actually use a specially fine ground rice flour called shiratamako. It makes the mochi suuuuuper soft.

What Rice Flour to Use for Snow Skin Mooncakes?

Most snow skin mooncake recipes I saw used a mixture of sweet rice flour, regular rice flour, and wheat starch. Some recipes specified that the sweet rice flour be mochiko, but some did not. My guess is that if you want to be super accurate, you should use a Chinese brand of sweet rice flour. Why? Well, remember when I said that there’s a more finely ground sweet rice flour called shiratamako that makes mochi extra soft? Using a different brand of rice flour can dramatically change the end texture of your rice cake.

But what if you’re lazy like me, and you don’t want to go hunting for a special sweet rice flour just for one recipe? Use mochiko. That’s what I did! Mochiko is very versatile (see all my other mochi recipes) and is able to maintain a firmer texture when cooked.

What about the regular rice flour? Can you skip it? Or sub it with mochiko?

I really recommend NOT doing that. Standard rice flour cooks up with an even firmer texture than mochiko. Because mooncakes need to hold their shape after being cooked and molded, you don’t want your rice cake to be too soft. My rainbow mochi recipe actually uses a mixture of mochiko and rice flour as well, so if you need a way to use up your extra flours, I got you.

And the wheat starch?

Well, I read that the wheat starch is what gives snow skin mooncakes their translucent look. Buuuuuuuut I also saw that the queen of beautiful mooncakes, Constellation Inspiration, uses tapioca starch in her recipe, so that’s what I used too! If you have an issue with that, take it up with her. Tapioca starch also seems to be a much more common ingredient to find in American grocery stores and can be used in other recipes, like as a thickener in pies!

One last change I would make to the snow skin wrapper recipe: omit the oil. Many recipes I saw called for a small amount of added oil. I’m not sure if this is to make the wrapper even more shiny and translucent, but I found that it just made it more… oily. I actually found a stickier dough easier to work with (maybe it’s my hobby mochi making background), so I would leave it out.

Other than that, my recipe is based off of Constellation Inspiration’s with just these few minor tweaks.

Easy Way to Steam Snow Skin Mooncake

I realize that a big barrier to making snow skin mooncakes for first timers is probably the steaming itself. But it’s really not as hard as it seems! Here’s how I do my setup:

I set a large pan on the stove with about a half inch of water. I place a steamer rack in the middle.

The bowl that I have my batter in is purposefully shallow. This makes the rice cake much quicker to cook through. I line it with a wet dish cloth both on the bottom and over the top of the batter. The cooked rice cake doesn’t stick to the wet cloth and it prevents too much moisture from dripping back down onto the dough.

I heat up the water with the steamer rack while I mix my batter and place it in the dish. When the water is bubbling, I use my cool steamer tongs to place the dish on top of the steamer rack. Cover with the lid and let cook!

These handy dandy steamer tongs are from Amazon!

Can You Make Mooncake Wrappers in the Microwave?

As with most steamed rice cake desserts, the answer is YES! Okay, I have not done this specifically myself with the mooncake wrappers, BUT I have done this with chi chi dango, which has almost the same ingredients. If you want to use the microwave, cover your dish with plastic wrap and microwave for 5-ish minutes or until the batter is cooked through. You’ll know the rice cake is done when its overall appearance looks more translucent and does not have any dry powdery pockets in the middle. If you take a bite and it tastes gritty, it is not cooked through.

How To Keep Snow Skin Wrapper from Sticking

Almost every single snow skin mooncake recipe I looked at called for toasted rice flour to dust on the rice cake. But if you make mochi, you’ll know that this is an unnecessary step! Take a note from mochi makers, and use katakuriko (potato starch) instead! It doesn’t need to be cooked! And its texture is so fine, that you won’t even notice it when you eat it.

Note: Omnivore’s cookbook did some research and found that many traditional recipes for snow skin mooncake use store-bought precooked rice flour. If you have access to this ingredient, you should use a different recipe entirely. This recipe is for those of us who are making do with what we have. This is The (Asian-American) Way. *shrug*

Different Kinds of Snow Skin Mooncake Fillings

The options for filling snow skin mooncakes are essentially endless. The key trait they all must have, though, is that they must be soft enough to mold but firm enough to hold their shape after. Red bean paste is a super common filling. You can definitely make it from scratch, but when I’m pressed for time (which is always), I use store-bought! Because red bean paste is such a common filling for mochi desserts too, it’s easy to find at Japanese grocery stores as well.

Another common filling is soft roasted vegetables, like pumpkin, sweet potato, Okinawan sweet potato, ube, or taro. These are great options to go with a fall harvest theme!

But for this recipe, I went with marzipan! It’s extremely unconventional, I know. But I’ve been watching Molly Yeh add marzipan into various foods for so long, it’s now engrained in my own cooking. I love it because it’s the perfect texture, AND you can buy it at the grocery store.

Because Mid Autumn landed in September this year, I also wrapped the marzipan around a small bite of peach. This is an ode to my strawberry marzipan daifuku recipe, which I love dearly. It’s also reminiscent of the fun fruit-filled daifuku you can find in Hawaii!

For years when Mid Autumn is in October, persimmon would be a great substitute for the peach.

Do You Make Snow Skin Mooncakes Hot or Cold?

All the recipes I saw for snow skin mooncakes said to chill the cooked rice dough before making your mooncakes, otherwise they’d be too hot to work with. But I STRONGLY disagree. Working with steaming hot rice dough is a RITE OF PASSAGE for Japanese mochi makers. When you can handle freshly steamed mochi without flinching, you will have officially reached Japanese Grandma Status.

Plus, cold rice cake gets hard and dry and won’t stick enough to form balls.

Dust your work surface and your hands with katakuriko to keep the dough from sticking, and work in quick motions, kneading the dough to release some of its steam. Then, before it cools, divide into even chunks, roll into small balls, roll out to pancakes, and wrap your filling.

At this step, you basically have daifuku. You could stop there and eat them if you want.

But to make them into mooncakes, simply stuff the whole thing into your mold and press. Gently push them out of the mold et voila! I got my 50g molds off of Amazon.

How to Dye Snow Skin Mooncake Wrappers

If you’re looking to get the cool marbly tie-dye effect, all it takes is some food coloring. After steaming, I divided my cooked rice dough into three parts. I did one drop of pink coloring in one part and one drop of yellow coloring in the other. I kneaded the chunks separately until the color was worked all the way through.

When I went to make my mooncakes, I ripped a small piece of rice cake from each of the three colors (plain, yellow, and pink) and stuck them together to form a ball. When you roll out the ball and wrap your filling, you should get a marbled effect.

Alrighty, I know that was a lot of information, but feel free to come back to this post as a reference for your mooncake making technique as needed. If you make some, share your pictures with me by tagging me on Instagram!