Ganache filled cupcakes with white chocolate cream cheese frosting.

As much as I despise the nuisance needed to make frosted cupcakes, I have attempted it again last week.

I followed this easy cupcakes recipe by Annabel Karmel in which you simply whisk all ingredients together, chocolate ganache to fill them, and white chocolate cream cheese frosting to ice them.

The cupcakes look adorable even when naked.

And the sprinkles are essential for camouflaging the cupcakes from my non-existent frosting skills.

I could not get even-sized centres with a gigantic knife and the crumbly cake texture. Consider the person lucky to get the cake with a bigger ganache centre.

Rose lychee mooncake.

Adapted yet again from Ellena Guan's mooncake recipe, I made some rose lychee jelly mooncakes last week and they were a hit.

I used BOH's Lychee with Rose teabags from the Seri Songket series. Adding milk to the tea, I thought, further highlighted its fragrance. I loved this flavour and would definitely make it again.

Rose Lychee Jelly Mooncake (makes 6 small mooncakes)

For the filling:

2 rose lychee teabags

200 ml milk

4 tbsp sugar

3 g agar agar powder

3 lychees, halved lengthwise

1. Cook milk over low heat, placing teabags in the milk to infuse for 3 minutes.

2. Add in sugar and agar agar powder. Boil mixture for at least 1 minute.

3. Pour mixture into 6 muffin cups (need not to fill as much as making plain mooncake filling since lychee will make up for the volume). Place each lychee slice in every cup. Let cool, then chill for 10 minutes.

For the skin:

150 ml canned lychee syrup

250 ml milk

50 g cream cheese

2 tbsp sugar

6 g agar agar powder

1. Boil syrup, milk and cream cheese. Stir until smooth.
2. Add in sugar and agar agar powder. Boil mixture for at least 1 minute. Strain mixture.
3. Line the bottom of 6 mooncake moulds using the jelly skin mixture, then chill for 5 minutes. Keep the remaining mixture warm.
4. When the jelly in mould is firm enough, scratch the surface using a skewer. Then, carefully place the filling into each of the mould, before covering the filling with the remaining skin mixture.
5. Chill for at least 30 minutes before unmoulding the jelly.

Milo jelly mooncake with cream cheese filling.

Mid-Autumn Festival is coming in two days. A little discouraged by my past efforts in trying to make snow skin mooncake, this year, I had picked up the courage to try making jelly mooncake.

My first attempt did not end well. Instead of measuring the agar agar powder using a weighing scale, I used teaspoon as called by the recipes. As a result, the jelly fillings ended up a little runny instead of firm. I didn't even get to the stage of making the mooncake "skin" since the fillings would not set.

My second attempt was better. I read through this article on using agar agar. But the discouragement I received from my first time prompted me to pour in more than enough agar agar. The jelly mooncakes turned out stiff.

My third attempt was much better. For this Milo Jelly Mooncake with Cream Cheese Filling, I referred to Ellena Guan's recipe for Chocolate Jelly Mooncake with Milk and Cream Cheese. I replaced cocoa powder with Milo powder.

Instead of the more conventional jelly mooncake plastic mould, I used silicone mould bought from Jadi. Jellies can be unmoulded easily when using a silicone mould. Besides, silicone is more resistant to heat and pressure compared to plastic mould (usually made from polyethylene terephthalate) which is not really heat-safe.