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It is definitely a taste of heaven with these chewy, cheesy, and creamy taro and cheese mooncakes. If you loved my Festive Snow Skin Mooncakes, you should also try this modern take on traditional mooncakes. This recipe uses cheese and sweet red beans as the filling wrapped around a taro-infused mooncake dough.

What Are Chinese Mooncakes?

Mooncakes are a traditional Chinese pastry that is often small and round about 10 centimeters or less in diameter. It has a thick outer layer made with glutinous rice flour and several other ingredients to enhance the texture. Its crust is soft and shiny and comes in a variety of designs and colors, depending on the bakery, region, and purpose.

Some are golden brown, while some are colorful like Snow Skin Mooncake. When it comes to texture, mooncakes are soft, chewy, and sticky just like mochi. Traditionally, mooncakes are filled with a delectable creamy paste, such as salted duck egg yolks, lotus seed paste, black sesame paste, and red bean paste.

This is popularly eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival or Mooncake Festival, which is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar. As you have already guessed, this is the time when the moon is full and bright. Thus, it has been a tradition for Chinese people to eat mooncakes shaped like the moon during this special festival.

All About Taro And Cheese Mooncakes

For this modern take on mooncake, the mooncake dough is made of steamed taro mixed with steamed purple potatoes for a deep purple color. I also mix in glutinous rice flour for stickiness, milk powder for creaminess, and sugar for sweetness. For the filling, I simply roll some cheese with sweet red beans to turn them into a round filling to be placed in the center of the mooncake dough.

Steamed taro is the main ingredient in this recipe. It is a starchy root vegetable with brown-grayish skin embedded with ring patterns and has white flesh with tiny light purple dots. This gives the mooncake a naturally sweet taste with nutty and earthy undertones.

One thing to note about taro is its high oxalate crystal content, which can be toxic when eaten raw and touched with bare hands. So, make sure to steam and cook the taro thoroughly before eating. Some types of taro emit a slimy substance when sliced that can cause skin irritation when touched, so I recommend wearing kitchen gloves to prevent this.

Ingredient Suggestions For Taro And Cheese Mooncake

Now, you can do a few things to tweak and personalize this recipe according to your preference. I recommend reading this section to learn more about alternatives and suggestions about each ingredient. On top of that, I also share filling recommendations to have a variety of flavors for your mooncakes.

Mooncake Dough

Taro: Get this vegetable from your local Asian supermarket or in the international aisle of a grocery store. Buy fresh, frozen, or canned taro. You can use your extra taro to make taro sago dessert soup, taro paste, or taro balls for bubble milk tea and grass jelly recipes. If you can’t find taro, swap it with more purple sweet potatoes or regular potatoes.
Purple sweet potato: Even though taro has purple specks in the flesh, it won’t make the mooncake have a deep purple color. To make it purple, you will need purple sweet potatoes. Using steamed purple potatoes is a natural way to color mooncakes. However, if you don’t have sweet purple potatoes, you can still color the mooncake purple using a small amount of purple potato powder. Aside from purple, other natural coloring ingredients you can use for a colorful mooncake are green matcha powder, green spinach powder, and pink beetroot juice.
GLUTINOUS rice flour (gluten-free): Glutinous rice flour is a key ingredient for the mooncake’s sticky and chewy texture. Keep in mind this is not the same as rice flour. Rice flour is made from milled long or medium-grain white rice, such as japonica, sinandomeng, angelica, or indica, whereas glutinous rice flour is made from glutinous rice or sticky rice. You can swap half the amount of glutinous rice flour for rice flour if needed. Refer to my Snow Skin Mooncake recipe where I use half glutinous rice flour and half rice flour for the dough. To learn more about these two special flours, read my guide, Rice Flour Vs Glutinous Rice Flour.
Sugar: I used zero-calorie sugar. However, you can use regular sugar like white sugar, maple syrup, brown sugar, coconut sugar, muscovado, or agave.
Milk powder: Add a milky taste and silky texture with milk powder. You can use regular or sugar-free milk powder. For a dairy-free substitute, use coconut milk powder, soy milk powder, cashew milk powder, or rice powder. It would be fine to remove this from the recipe if you prefer no milk powder.

Cheese Filling

Cheese: I used mozzarella cheese since it is semi-soft, making it easier to roll into a ball with honey red beans. You can use other soft cheese alternatives like gouda, provolone, cheese slices, and shredded cheddar. Make this completely vegan using dairy-free or plant-based cheese alternatives.
Sweet red beans or honey red beans: Honey red beans are sweetened red beans (adzuki beans) made from boiled red beans mixed with sugar. You can buy ready-made honey red beans from local Asian supermarkets or online stores like Amazon. However, you can also get the uncooked red beans and make your own homemade honey red beans using my 7-step sweetened red bean Don’t worry about leftover beans since you can use this for several desserts, such as sweet red bean soup with sago (红豆西米露) and grass jelly dessert. You can also make red bean paste, which can be used for red bean paste buns and red bean bread.
Filling alternatives: There are countless fillings to choose from for more diverse flavors. You can try egg custard from my Cantonese steamed egg custard buns (Nai Wong Bao) recipe, which I also used for my snow skin mooncake. The fillings can be traditional or unconventional, such as the following:
- Taro paste
- Red bean paste
- Yam paste
- Lotus seed paste
- Purple sweet potato paste
- Black sesame paste
- Mung bean paste
- Matcha bean paste
- Ice cream
- Floss meat like pork floss and chicken floss
- Chocolate

The Best Way To Make Taro And Cheese Mooncakes

Are you a newbie in making mooncakes? If yes, do not skip this part just yet. I share my foolproof tips and suggestions below on the best ways to make mooncakes.

Cool the dough before shaping: At first, the dough may be too warm and soft because of the steamed taro and purple potatoes. Allow it to cool and firm up to make it easier to shape and handle.
Cook the glutinous rice flour: Glutinous rice flour should be toasted on the pan before mixing it with the rest of the dough ingredients. Keep in mind this cannot be eaten raw, so it should be toasted on a non-stick pan until its white color becomes light cream. Once the cooked glutinous rice flour is mixed with moisture, it will become sticky.
Dust with cooked glutinous rice flour for easy handling: Dusting helps prevent stickiness when handling the dough. You can also dust the mooncake mold to make it easier to remove and retain the intricate designs without sticking or deforming. Just remember not to over-dust it with too much flour as this may change the texture drastically.
Use a mooncake mold or cookie cutter: Mooncake molds are available in Chinese markets or online stores like Amazon or eBay. Using a mooncake mold will make it even more authentic. These typically have imprinted designs, such as patterns, Chinese characters, flowers, and animals. I suggest getting assorted designs with interchangeable design plates that can be easily swapped and pressed. Some mooncake molds are already finished with a non-stick coating, which can easily unmold the mooncakes without sticking so you don’t have to dust them. You can buy molds for 50g or 100g mooncakes. Alternatively, you can also use a regular cookie stamp.
Store the mooncakes in an airtight container: I highly suggest eating your finished mooncakes as soon as possible to savor the best texture. Once it is stored in the fridge, its texture becomes more firm. Should you decide to store it in the fridge, keep it in an airtight container and consume it within three days. You can prolong its shelf life even further by keeping it in the freezer each wrapped in cling wrap.

Get Ready With These Kitchen Tools And Ingredients

What I love about making taro mooncakes is that you don’t need an oven to bake them. All it takes is steaming the taro and potatoes and mixing them with the dough ingredients. Then, assemble it with the filling and mold it in the mooncake mold, and you are ready to serve it.

Don’t have a steamer? You can steam without a steamer in 5 ways: pan with steamer rack, microwave, pan with sieve, rice cooker, and instant pot. You will also need a blender or food processor, a non-stick pan, a mixing bowl, and other baking tools to help.

Additionally, you will need the following items:

Kitchen Tools

Knife and chopping board
Steamer
Blender or food processor
Non-stick pan
Spatula
Mixing bowl
Kitchen gloves
Piping bag
Kitchen weighing scale
Mooncake mold

Ingredients

300g of taro (diced)
50g of purple sweet potato (chopped)
30g of cooked glutinous rice flour, toast additional glutinous rice flour and adjust the amount of cooked glutinous rice flour to your liking while kneading the mooncake dough.
30g of sugar-free milk powder
30g of sugar
100g of mozzarella cheese
50g of honey red beans (or your preferred filling)
Cooking oil for greasing the mooncake molds—this step is optional

Detailed Steps On Making Taro And Cheese Mooncakes

The three main parts of the recipe are making the dough, preparing the filling, and assembling the dough and filling ready for shaping in the mold. Learn how I did by watching my Instagram or TikTok tutorial reels. Remember to leave a comment, share this recipe, and tag @kitchenmisadventures to show your mooncake creations.

Make The Dough

Prepare the taro by peeling, washing, and slicing it into cubes.
Peel and chop the purple potato.
Steam the chopped taro and purple potato until soft enough to mash.
After steaming, blend the steamed taro and purple potato in a food processor or blender. Blend until smooth like paste.
In a non-stick pan, toast the glutinous rice flour over low heat until its white color turns slightly cream-colored.
In a bowl, mix and knead the steamed taro and purple potato, cooked glutinous rice flour, sugar, and milk powder. The quantity of cooked glutinous rice flour is not fixed; add it gradually in small amounts until the mixture forms a cohesive dough.
Divide the mooncake dough into 40g portions.

Prepare The Filling

For the filling, combine the cheese and honey red beans. Mix the two until the honey red beans are evenly distributed. Aside from honey red beans, you can also incorporate other favorite ingredients, such as nuts and raisins.
Transfer the filling to a piping bag to make forming 10g balls of filling easier. Alternatively, using a spoon will do the job if you don’t have a piping bag.
Place the fillings on a tray and freeze them.

Assemble The Mooncake

Take one portion of the taro dough and flatten it into a circular wrapper.
Place a ball of cheese and honey red beans in the center.
Seal the wrapper by pinching the edges and shaping it into a round ball.
Grease the mooncake molds and press the assembled mooncake onto the mold to take its shape.
Unmold the mooncake from the mold.
Refrigerate the mooncakes for better flavor and texture.

Taro Snow Skin Mooncake With Cheese

It is definitely a taste of heaven with these chewy, cheesy, and creamy taro and cheese mooncakes. If you loved my Festive Snow Skin Mooncakes, you should also try this modern take on traditional mooncakes. This recipe uses cheese and sweet red beans as the filling wrapped around a taro-infused mooncake dough.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 30

Cook Time 28

Course Dessert, Side Dish, Snack

Cuisine Chinese

Servings

Calories 215 kcal