Purple Spiral Taro Mooncake ~ Natural Colour

I just made these out of curiosity.

They didn't really turn out well, as I find the crust to be not well baked. And there's no flaky effect.
So, there's no need to share the recipe.

But I'd like to share with you, how I got my purple streaks, without the use of any artificial food colouring.

The technique to make this dough, is to use an oil dough and a water dough, and do some rolling and layering work. To get the flaky effect, lard is used and nowadays, shortening. And deep frying creates beautiful separated layers, like a flower sort of thing.

I refused to use either fat and went with butter.
I didn't want to fry as I saw some that had good results with baking... but they used shortening.

I was willing to take a risk.

I wanted to create a purple and white layers and so.... I used carrot juice as the liquid for my water dough.

Purple Carrot Juice! I grated them finely and mixed with a little bit of water water so that the pigment will taint the water, squeeze the pulp to release more pigments.

That's just what I did!

If you are in Klang Valley, I guess most organic shops do have purple carrots. In Ipoh, try to hunt fruit shops in Ipoh Garden and sometimes Aeon has it as well.

FYI, purple is the original colour of carrots. Orange is not the original colour but created by humans.

wrapped, and raw

I made 4 large mooncakes with salted egg yolks and 6 smaller ones without yolks. All underbaked.
I tried to rebake them, but ended up becoming overbaked, with the filling bursting out.

I had fun making these and that was it. End of story :)

Happy Mid Autumn Everyone :)