Mooncake Cupcakes (Bean Paste Filled Cupcakes With Date-Pineapple Cream Cheese Frosting)

In Singapore, Mid-Autumn Festival is when kids get to stay out late and play with lanterns. The best part is when someone's lantern goes up in flames, especially if that lantern looks better than mine. Nowadays most kids get those noisy electric ones that play some unidentifiable out-of-tune pop songs.

In Taiwan, people hang out along the streets outside their apartment / shopfront, with their little bbq stove and beer. No lanterns here, but there are firecrackers and fireworks!

I've been itching to try this recipe since I first saw it on Cupcakeblog. The blogger is really creative with the use of ingredients and flavours, and all her recipes are very inspiring. The bean paste takes a lot of work as it's not easy passing the paste through the sieve, I took at least an hour with short breaks in between to finally finish making it. The result is worth it though, fragrant and not overly sweet like the store-bought bean paste.

The cake is just the right sweetness for me (and my testers), but the cream cheese frosting is too sweet with the dried fruit. What I did the second time was use my own cream cheese frosting recipe and add in 1/4 cup chopped dates and 1/4 cup dried pineapple. Do not leave out the sesame seeds because they provide a nice balance to all that sweetness, and they look so pretty too!

Recipe from Cupcake Blog - Mooncake Cupcakes



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Cream Cheese Frosting

I always have a problem with grainy cream cheese frosting until I found this method through extensive googling. The trick is to use room temperature butter and cold cream cheese. I can't really bring myself to use 2 to 4 cups of sugar for the frosting so this is my own recipe using only 1/2 cup sugar.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup sifted icing sugar
70g butter (room temperature)
8oz packet cream cheese (cut up into small cubes)
vanilla essence (optional

Steps:
1. Beat butter til soft and creamy
2. Add icing sugar and beat till fluffy
3. Add cream cheese and beat till mixed in

If the frosting is too hard to pipe, beat the mixture further or leave it at room temperature for a while and it will soften.


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