Butterfly Pea Flower Fruit Jelly Mooncakes Recipe

This butterfly pea flower fruit jelly mooncakes recipe uses bingfen powder to set it, making the jellies both vegan-friendly and crystal clear.

In my raindrop cake recipe, I went into more detail about two different bingfen powder brands you might find and how they both need different quantities. For this recipe, I used Kang Yaku (KYK) powder as it's more readily available in the UK. But I'll add the quantity for another popular brand, just in case you happen to get your hands on it instead.

You can use any tinned fruit in syrup for this recipe, but I used pineapple-stuffed rambutans because they kind of resembled the salted egg yolk inside a traditional baked Cantonese mooncake.

The colour you get from the butterfly pea flowers will depend on the water you're using and the syrup from the fruit. A neutral-ish pH like water will give you blue. More acid (from fruit juice/syrup, in this case) turns it pink. Alkali turns it back to blue, but I find too much turns it more blue-green.

If you're not happy with the shade of blue/purple/pink of your flower-dyed syrup while you're making it, feel free to add a tiny pinch of bicarbonate of soda (to bring the blue back) or a couple of drops of lemon juice (to get more pink hues) as needed. You only need a tiny bit of each for the colour to change, so be careful. Adding too much of either will taste bad, too.

You can also find moulds specifically for jelly mooncakes with more recognisable, traditional mooncake designs, but I decided to just use what I had: a few small silicone cake moulds.

You can watch the full video on YouTube channel, Tashcakes:

Ready? Let's go.

Ingredients

1 tin of rambutans stuffed with pineapple in syrup
250ml syrup from the tin
A few fried butterfly pea flowers (6–8, depending on how deeply coloured you want it)
1/2 tbsp caster sugar
A litte extra cold water
12g KYK bingfen powder / 6g Ayixi bingfen powder

Method:

1. Start by emptying your tin of stuffed rambutans into a sieve over a bowl to drain the syrup – reserve 150ml of the syrup to use and discard the rest.

2. Pop a rambutan into each of your moulds.

3. Pour the syrup and water into a small saucepan and add the butterfly pea flower. Simmer on a low to medium heat for a couple of minutes until it's coloured to your liking, and fish out the flowers with a fork.

4. Pour gently into a measuring jug, discarding any flower debris right at the bottom of the syrup. Then stir in the sugar while still hot, and top up with cold water until the liquid reaches 250ml again (some will have evaporated off while you simmed it with the flowers).

5. Leave the syrup to cool to room temperature, then pour it into a clean pan.

6. Stir in your bingfen powder, and turn the heat back on.

7. Simmer for a couple of minutes while stirring gently, and pour the hot mixture straight into your moulds over the fruits.

8. Leave to cool to room temperature before chilling in the fridge for a couple more hours (preferably overnight, as this dessert tastes best fully chilled).

9. Turn the jellies out of their moulds and serve.

Enjoy, and have fun.