When chocolatier Wendy Lieu determined she wished to pay homage to the Mid-Autumn Competition, she knew she needed to infuse the style of mooncakes, that vacation mainstay, into a fragile chocolate shell.
Throughout many Asian nations, the Mid-Autumn Competition is among the many most vital holidays of the 12 months, with households gathering collectively to have fun the harvest moon. The pageant’s emblematic deal with is a sweet round pastry, generally crammed with the long-lasting mixture of lotus seed paste and salted duck-egg yolks. The truffles are exchanged, admired for his or her designs, then loved with family members, and Lieu’s Vietnamese household was no exception. “As a baby, my favourite a part of mooncakes had been the egg yolks—some had double yolks,” she recollects. “I bear in mind slicing them open, consuming the yolk, and giving the remaining portion to my mother and father.”
However easy methods to ship the flavors, texture, and signature salted-egg-yolk middle in a sublime, bite-sized gourmand truffle? Not surprisingly, the co-owner of San Francisco’s Socola Chocolates couldn’t find anybody else who had achieved, and even tried, this transformation.
This wasn’t Lieu’s first time making an attempt 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 candies. (Socola, in spite of everything, is the Vietnamese phrase for chocolate.) Nonetheless, mooncakes posed distinctive challenges. The hearty treats are baked, whereas candies usually are not, so one hurdle was attaining the right consistency in a lotus seed paste, probably the most 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 clients delicately slicing her mooncake chocolates 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 certain they didn’t ooze into the filling.
Along with the standard filling, Lieu additionally created mooncake candies starring ube, black sesame, and jasmine tea, topped with coloured splatters to match their defining ingredient.
The mooncake candies are the cherry on high of what has been a full-circle entrepreneurial journey for Lieu, who launched Socola Candies along with her sister Susan again once they had been youngsters rising up in Santa Rosa, California. After faculty, the siblings would go to the nail salon their mother and father owned and go to the neighboring See’s Candies store without spending a dime samples. These See’s candies, which Lieu discovered to be overly candy, impressed her to experiment with creating her personal. She infused them with components emblematic of her Vietnamese heritage—every thing from sriracha and passionfruit to guava and cognac. When her clients 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 recollects.
The mooncake candies, Lieu says, are one other homage to her tradition. “I’ve so many reminiscences of cracking open a tin, rigorously slicing up every mooncake into particular person bite-sized items, and sharing with household and pals.”
