Vietnamese snow skin mooncake (Banh deo) is soft-chewy on the outside. You can put any mooncake filling inside it.
Snow skin mooncake (bánh dẻo) and baked mooncake (bánh nướng) are the two delicacies of Mid-Autumn Festival in Vietnam. Most Vietnamese people prefer the baked cakes over snow skin ones though :). In this post, I want to show you how this Vietnamese traditional cake is made.
Vietnamese snow skin mooncakes are not the same as those from neighboring countries like Singapore and China. They are chewy on the outside and usually very sweet. The skin is much sweeter than that of the baked ones. They are kept at room temperature because if you store them in the refrigerator, they’ll turn hard as a rock.
Ingredients
Banh deo is not baked. Instead, it is made from cooked glutinous rice flour. The flour may also be called fried glutinous rice flour. As far as I know, it is impossible to make this flour at home. You can try toasting or even baking raw glutinous rice flour, but the result will be completely different.
So what is cooked glutinous rice flour? Glutinous rice is puffed up and toasted first, and then processed into fine flour. That’s why the flour has a distinct taste compared to the one you make by toasting raw flour at home.
The best places to find this flour are local Asian grocery stores. It is called “bột bánh dẻo” in Vietnamese. Above is the brand I use in Vietnam.
For the filling, you can use any mooncake filling you like. In Vietnam, the most popular filling for traditional snow skin mooncakes is mixed nuts. We use the mixed nuts filling from our banh nuong recipe.
How to Make Vietnamese Snow Skin Mooncakes
Generally speaking, snow skin cakes are quicker and easier to make than baked one. The dough simply consists of cooked glutinous flour, sugar and water.
Since the flour is already fully cooked, the dough will not be cooked. You will put the filling inside, form a ball, use a mooncake mold to shape it. Then the cake will be eaten directly after a day. You can watch the process in the video below.
Traditional banh deo is very very sweet. The level of sweetness is almost inedible to me. So I tried to reduce sugar as much as I can in this recipe, although it would speed up the spoilage process. Normally, this cake can be kept for only 4-5 days.
My family almost never buys commercially-made snow skin mooncakes because of concern about poor food hygiene practice. Although I prefer the baked cakes, I do enjoy the soft-chewy texture of snow skin cakes.
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