Pastry enthusiast enjoys cooking for friends

Beijinger Wang Hongyan gets a bit busy before Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Sep 19 this year. For the past three years, she has been making mooncakes by herself and giving them to friends.

Why?

"When I give the cakes to friends, they really like it," says Wang, 41, who owns a clothing store in Beijing.

This year she made 400 mooncakes - the most she's ever baked.

Wang purchases all of the ingredients on her own. When she finishes baking, Wang packs the cakes neatly into small boxes she buys on the Internet. They look as good as the ones sold at pastry shops and taste better.

Like her friends, she has grown tired of the mooncakes sold at the market.

"They all taste the same, and most of the time they are too oily and too sweet," she says.

Wang began baking in 2007, when she moved to a new house with a big kitchen. She purchased all the equipment needed and printed recipes from a micro blog.

But she soon found she could not just rely on the Internet. So she used Wayne Gisslen's Professional Baking, an authoritative book on the subject.

"The Chinese translations of baking recipes are often not accurate, which can lead me to use something different," she says.

For example, the term "self-rising flour" refers to flour with baking powder, but in China it is flour with yeast.

Wang is now able to bake all sorts of Western pastries. The most complicated cake she has made is an opera cake with nine layers. But she considers bread the most difficult item to make.

"That's because the flour to make bread takes a long time to leaven. The extent of leavening, and the extent of kneading is rather difficult to grasp," she says.

Cookies are the easiest to bake, followed by cakes.

She says what inspired her to learn how to bake was Korean TV drama Kim Sam-Soon.

"When I saw the female lead holding a Madelin cake in her hand, and a French book in another, explaining the cake to somebody, I thought that was lovely, and became very interested to learn how to bake," she recalls.

The mooncakes Wang made this year for her friends are Su, or Suzhou-style crispy cakes with an egg and lotus paste stuffing.

Besides Suzhou, the most common mooncakes are Cantonese and Yunnan styles. Wang distinguishes the mooncakes according to the texture of the crust.

"Cantonese style has a soft crust. Suzhou style has a crispy crust. Yunnan style has hard crust. Beijing style has a similar hard crust," she says. "Suzhou-style is more delicious, but more complicated to make."

She buys half-processed salty egg yolk from an Internet shop. Lotus paste is from Lianxianglou, a famous supplier in Guangdong province.

She uses butter instead of pork oil to make the crispy crust because it tastes better when cold. Also, pork oil can be a bit greasy.

The whole process includes kneading the dough to make crispy crust, wrapping salted egg yolk with lotus paste and putting the egg stuffing into the dough. Making 40-80 mooncakes takes three to four hours.

Wang says the most mooncakes she has baked in one day is 180.

The mooncakes she makes are mostly salted egg yolk with lotus paste, red bean paste, pineapple, and milk and egg.

Cantonese-style mooncakes are much easier to make, she says. It needs "just one helping for the crust and nine for the stuffing".

"But Cantonese-style has been made too much," she says. "Su style has a novelty and doesn't taste so greasy."

Many of Wang's friends have also begun learning how to make pastries. It is a good hobby, especially at a time when food safety has become a big concern. The pastries they make will be a much-anticipated gift among their friends.

Does Wang still ever buy mooncakes? Usually not, but sometimes when she discovers something that looks "top-grade" or different, such as the "fresh flower" moon cake and "French style" moon cake, she buys one to try it. She likes to pick up ideas from other cooks that she can also use.