This is the story of a food experiment gone awry.
Chicken Propped up on a Guinness Beer Can
It all started when I read an article in the paper about Arthur’s Day, a day to commemorate the signing of the lease on Arthur Guinness’s brewery, over 250 years ago. You know, the maker of the popular Guinness Stout beer. The company is holding a worldwide music festival on September 22 to celebrate.
That article sparked an idea in my head to cook something with Guinness beer in time with Arthur’s Day. But I wasn’t interested in making an Irish Stew. I wanted to revisit a cooking technique that I hadn’t done in a long time, since before we moved from San Jose to Kuching: Beer Can Chicken. In the past, I’ve gotten tasty results using Heineken beer, so I figured to try making it again, only this time using Guinness Stout instead.
That was the start of the troubles…
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Here’s a fun and cute way to use up the leftover dough and filling after making a batch of Traditional Baked Mooncakes.
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This is the recipe for the traditional, baked Chinese Mooncake that is typically eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. The mooncake filling consists of a salted egg yolk, surrounded by sweet lotus seed paste, which is wrapped in a thin, tender skin and then pressed into a round or square mold to impart a design onto the skin. The cake is partially baked, brushed with an egg wash, and then finished in the oven.

Last year, I got into making snowskin mooncakes and pandan spiral mooncakes for the Mooncake Festival. (The pandan spiral mooncakes are seriously awesome; I already have orders for more.) However this year, I decided that I had to try my hands with the traditional baked mooncakes. After making three batches of these mooncakes recently, I can say that they’re pretty simple to make, and they come out as good as or even better than store-bought.
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