Mooncake with special layered-cake filling to celebrate Mid-Autumn fest

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Mooncake with Sarawak’s famous layered-cake (kek lapis) fillings produced by Maria for the Mid-Autumn Festival. — Bernama photo

KUCHING: Creative innovation led a woman entrepreneur to create a unique mooncake with Sarawak’s famous layered-cake (kek lapis) as its filling, a new twist to the traditional filling of traditional Chinese confection to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Layered cake entrepreneur, Maria Ngui Sai Moi, 43, said the traditional mooncake has various types of filling such as salted egg yolks, durian, red bean, pandan, lotus seeds and many more.

The mother of two said she started to create the cake variety in 2014 for personal consumption, but this year she was determined to introduce it to the market for the Mid-Autumn Festival which will be celebrated on Sept 24.

“I’m using the snow skin as the outer part of the mooncake and the premium layered cake for its filling. To produce the mooncake, I will bake the layered-cake first, and cut it with a custom-designed round cutter to be put inside the snow skin dough before shaping it with the mooncake moulds.

“For this year, I will be producing 14 different types of layered cakes as the mooncake filling, this includes rainbow cheese, fruity cheese, matcha cheese, durian, black sesame, chocolate rainbow cheese, chocolate mint, blueberry cheese, Sarawak batik, coffee and cappuccino,” she told Bernama.

Maria shows traditional mooncake and mooncake with layered-cake (kek lapis) fillings. — Bernama photo

Although she would be focusing on producing mooncakes with layered-cake filling, Maria also continues to bake mooncakes with six varieties of traditional filling which are the red bean, lotus, red dates, baba nyonya, salt moon bean and pandan moon bean, in smaller quantities.

“The mooncakes with layered-cake filling will be priced at RM10 and RM12 according to the grade of the cake, while traditional mooncakes would be sold at RM8, RM10 and RM12,” she said.

Having produced and sold traditional mooncakes since 2010, Maria admitted that ever since the news spread about the new ‘layered-cake mooncakes’ variety, she and her two helpers, assisted by her husband and children, have receiving customer orders non stop.

She said they have baked about 100 mooncakes for each layered-cake flavour daily at her bakery at Bishopgate Street, here.

“So far, we have sold about 2,000 mooncakes. As the demand continues to increase, based on the capacity of this bakery, I think we are able to produce about 10,000 pieces of mooncakes per flavour,” she added.

With 26 years’ experience as a layered cake entrepreneur, Maria feels the pride of producing something special for this year’s Mid-Autumn celebration.

“Actually, when I started to make these layered-cake mooncake varieties, I myself was amazed by the final product, it is beautiful and tasty, it is not that I’m saying my invention is the best as the traditional mooncakes have its own uniqueness,” she added. – Bernama