When chocolatier Wendy Lieu determined she wished to pay homage to the Mid-Autumn Pageant, she knew she needed to infuse the style of mooncakes, that vacation mainstay, into a fragile chocolate shell.
Throughout many Asian international locations, the Mid-Autumn Pageant is among the many most necessary holidays of the 12 months, with households gathering collectively to have fun the harvest moon. The competition’s emblematic deal with is a candy spherical pastry, generally crammed with the long-lasting mixture of lotus seed paste and salted duck-egg yolks. The desserts are exchanged, admired for his or her designs, then loved with family members, and Lieu’s Vietnamese household was no exception. “As a toddler, my favourite a part of mooncakes have been the egg yolks—some had double yolks,” she remembers. “I keep in mind reducing them open, consuming the yolk, and giving the remaining portion to my dad and mom.”
However learn how to ship the flavors, texture, and signature salted-egg-yolk middle in a sublime, bite-sized connoisseur truffle? Not surprisingly, the co-owner of San Francisco’s Socola Sweets couldn’t find anybody else who had achieved, and even tried, this transformation.
This wasn’t Lieu’s first time trying a brand new twist on a nostalgic meals—she had beforehand integrated the essences of durian, Vietnamese espresso, and even Phở, all beloved flavors in her tradition, into her sweets. (Socola, in spite of everything, is the Vietnamese phrase for chocolate.) Nonetheless, mooncakes posed distinctive challenges. The hearty treats are baked, whereas sweets usually are not, so one hurdle was reaching the correct consistency in a lotus seed paste, one of the vital common fillings amongst mooncake lovers. After some experimentation, the chocolatier found the best strategy: soaking the lotus seeds, eradicating the tiny sprouts by hand, pressure-cooking them, mashing them right into a paste, and—right here’s the important thing—including white chocolate into the filling.
As a result of Lieu envisioned prospects delicately slicing her mooncake sweets in half to disclose the tiny golden orbs inside, the salted egg yolks needed to maintain their form. She discovered that she wanted to bury the yolks in salt and allow them to set for a month within the fridge earlier than gently washing and baking them, then slicing them into diminutive balls. This prolonged course of made positive they didn’t ooze into the filling.
Along with the normal filling, Lieu additionally created mooncake sweets starring ube, black sesame, and jasmine tea, topped with coloured splatters to match their defining ingredient.
The mooncake sweets are the cherry on high of what has been a full-circle entrepreneurial journey for Lieu, who launched Socola Sweets together with her sister Susan again once they have been youngsters rising up in Santa Rosa, California. After college, the siblings would go to the nail salon their dad and mom owned and go to the neighboring See’s Candies store at no cost samples. These See’s sweets, which Lieu discovered to be overly candy, impressed her to experiment with creating her personal. She infused them with substances emblematic of her Vietnamese heritage—every part from sriracha and passionfruit to guava and cognac. When her prospects tasted her chocolate truffles imbued with these traditional flavors, the treats spurred long-forgotten reminiscences. “It actually opened up conversations about Saigon, again within the day,” she remembers.
The mooncake sweets, Lieu says, are one other homage to her tradition. “I’ve so many reminiscences of cracking open a tin, fastidiously reducing up every mooncake into particular person bite-sized items, and sharing with household and buddies.”
