Snow Skin Green Tea Mooncakes

...And so they said, the rest is history. Since I started buying ingredients for moontarts, like white lotus paste, I can't help but to buy green tea paste. However, I wasn't ready to bake "bake skin" mooncakes, I ended up buying snow skin pre-mix to go with my green tea paste. Then of course, I will need to buy melon seeds. So the list went on & on & on...

Thinking that snow skin mooncakes weren't that difficult since I have all the ready-made ingredients, I made the Green Tea mooncakes after baking my walnut moontarts. I wasn't ready to bake snow skin initially, and didn't have any ready recipe to follow. I had to search the web for a recipe using the pre-mix snow skin. I finally found one at Sweet Decadenze. I tried to follow her recipe, hopefully it worked.

Modified Recipe
Ingredients:

For Snowskin Dough:
250g RED MAN Snow Skin Premix
100g Ice water
50g shortening
1 tsp Green Tea Powder

For Mooncake Paste:
500g Green Tea paste
25g Melon seeds, lightly baked
15g Pumpkin seeds (Optional)

Method:
1. Add ice water to the premix and green tea powder to form a soft dough. Do not add all the water at one go. Check for consistency before adding more ice water in.
2. Knead in the shortening. Ensure that no lumps are formed and the dough becomes smooth.
3. Leave the dough aside to rest for about 30-45 minutes in a cool, dry place (or chill in the fridge).
4. Meanwhile, spread green tea paste on a piece of plastic sheet. Spread melon seeds on the paste and roll the paste up like rolling a swiss roll. Spread the paste and roll it up again to make sure melon seeds are nicely "embedded" in the paste.
5. Divide mooncake paste into 20 portions of about 26g each. Knead each portion a little and form each into a ball.
6. Divide the rested dough into 20 portions of 20g each. Knead each portion a little and form each into a ball.
7. Flatten a snow skin dough on your palm to be a 2-inch circle. Press to make the edges thinner than the central part.
8. Place a ball of paste. Start pushing the paste against the dough. As you push the paste, the dough will start enlarging.
9. Wrap up the mooncake and roll into a ball.
10. Place the ball into the mould and press until a flat surface is achieved.
11. Knock out the shaped mooncake from the mould by lightly knocking in all directions with one hand and using the other hand to catch the dislodged mooncake.
12. Immediately chill the mooncakes in an airtight container.

Notes:
a) I used about 115g of water, which resulted in a very soft skin. So when I tried to remove the mooncake from the mould, it is extremely difficult, and you can see that my designs are not sharp, as some of the skin were actually stuck to the mould.
b) The mould I used is from Phoon Huat. Therefore, halving the recipe makes exactly 20 mini mooncakes.
c) Putting pumpkin seeds is optional. I thought since all are green, add more greens to the green...
d) You may add colouring to the snow skin if you prefer darker green.
e) Some of the steps above were extracted from Jo's Deli. You may refer to her site for more detailed steps.