The wife cake recipe below is courtesy of the Hong Kong tourism bureau’s cake-making class, hosted by the Wing Wah bakery in Kowloon. The recipe assumes that you buy the filling pre-made – I couldn’t find any near me and so made a red bean paste and a mung bean paste from scratch instead (see recipe at the bottom), which meant that the whole process took a bit longer, but was overall quite simple to do. I’ve seen a few different variations on the recipe around, so feel free to experiment with the ingredients to come up with your own version.
Ingredients (makes roughly 32):
Skin (饼皮)
- Flour (面粉), 150g
- Vegetable oil (植物油), 70g
- Water (水), 70g (begin with slightly less)
- 1 egg (鸡蛋)
Pastry (酥油)
- Flour (面粉), 150g
- Vegetable oil (植物油), 70g
Filling (馅料)
- Gourd / red bean paste (冬瓜容/红豆容), 70g
OR, if making your own red bean / mung bean paste:
- Approximately 2 dl of red beans and/or mung beans
- Sugar
Instructions:
1. Mix the ingredients for the skin, adding the water last to ensure that the dough is smooth and easy to work with but doesn’t have too much liquid. Divide into smaller balls of dough, roughly 32 in total.
2. Mix the ingredients for the pastry, and divide into smaller balls of dough, the same number as for the skin (which should give you portions that are slightly smaller than the portions for the skin).
3. Prepare the filling, either by buying gourd / red bean paste, or by making your own filling. I made red bean and mung bean paste for mine (see recipe below), and a type of glutinous rice paste is also occasionally used. Divide into portions, same number of portions for the skin and pastry and roughly the same size.
4. Blend the skin and pastry by first wrapping the skin around the pastry, and then folding and re-folding to create many thin layers inside the dough. See this video, starting at around 9.30, for a demonstration of how this can be done.
5. Wrap the blended dough around the filling, and flatten slightly. The chef in the video I’ve linked to above flattens them quite a lot, while the Wing Wah chef’s only flattened the dough slightly.
6. Place the cakes on a baking tray and brush with beaten egg. Let the egg dry, and then brush once more.
7. Bake at 180°C for 15-20 minutes, until the cakes are golden brown.
To make your own red bean or mung bean filling：
1. Let the beans soak in water overnight.
2. Rinse beans, cover with fresh water, and bring to boil on the stove. Reduce to a simmer, and let simmer for 1-2 hours. Skim off the white foam that rises to the top (mainly for the mung beans).
3. The beans are ready once they can easily be crushed with a fork or spatula. Remove from the stove, but keep some of the water that the beans were boiled in.
4. Peel the mung beans (the red beans do not need to be peeled). This is the most time-consuming step, and I’m not sure if it can be skipped – if you don’t have the patience for this step, stick to just red bean paste. One tactic that some people use is to bring the beans to a boil once again and skim off the skins that float to the surface. However, I found that most of the beans still needed to be peeled by hand.
5. Add sugar to taste (I used roughly 0.5 dl white caster sugar), and fry the paste with a small amount of oil until it is smooth and has the right consistency. It may be useful at this stage to add in a small amount of the water that the beans were boiled in.
6. Once the paste has been prepared, it can be kept refrigerated for roughly one week.
Beans soaking overnight
Dough split into portions and ready to be rolled into wife cakes
Finished wife cakes! Slightly higher dough to filling ratio than would be ideal, but still delicious