Featured Hand carved wood Chinese Rice Moon Cake mold w/ handle. Age?

I bought this thinking it was a cookie mold. I think the design would be too large for butter BWDIK.

It is 7 1/2" long, 3 7/8" across at its widest point & is 7 /8" thick. The design is 3 3/8" by 3 3/8" across & is 1/2" deep.

It appears to me to be hand carved & the design gives me a PA Dutch/Amish/German vibe, but I couldn't find anything that looked like this one.

It also appears to have been well loved & used a lot, but how old would you guess it to be?



Thanks for any & all advice or opinions!!

 

It may be a Chinese rice moon cake mould. The central design looks like a Chinese character to me.

 

@Houseful - Wow!! I never in a million years would have thought Chinese, mainly because I have never hear of Rice Moon Cakes.

I just thought that center part was part of a design but now that you mention it there is some similarity to a Chinese character.

Off to check out Rice Moon Cake molds.

Thanks Houseful!!!

 

You are welcome, I came across some wooden moulds myself, more modern, not as nice as yours and thought they were for butter but they were for some sort of Middle Eastern spiced cake and I discovered the Mooncake ones then.

 

I did see the Lebanese ones also but there designs were much smaller.

I found one doing a Google search that looks very much like mine & is supposedly listed on Etsy, but I wasn't able to locate it by searching Etsy so I don't know what theirs is priced. They described it as c.1940.

I believe the Chinese character is longevity.

Thanks again!!

 

The Middle Eastern molds are for date filled cookies called ma'amoul. I have some of these molds, and have made the cookies

 

I've eaten lots of moon cakes, round ones and square ones but none this shape and none of them contained any rice! Lotus paste and eggs, yes but rice? not a chance.

 

Hi,
I miss the moon cakes I used to buy in Chinatown in NYC. Now my tongue is hanging out.
greg

 

There are lots of different recipes, the Snow skin or snowy moon cakes are made using glutinous rice.

 

The frozen snowy's I've eaten didn't have any rice, delicious though ...I'm just familiar with Cantonese/Hong Kong moon cakes from NA West coast communities though, so maybe that's the difference ..wife is Cantonese

<edit>however it might be the snowy's outer casing COULD be a thinned out type of sticky rice, but there again, snowys are not that common IMO. Generally when you talk moon cakes, you are referring to the traditional (and VERY expensive) kind.

 

When I was doing some searching around I definitely got more hits when I eliminated the word rice.

Thanks everyone!!

 

I believe the snowy moon cakes are more modern.

 

Definitely a Chinese cake/bun mold. My mother's got loads of these for making various dessert-cakes.

Half of them she doesn't even use, but they're nice to have for decoration. The modern ones are usually made of plastic, but you can still buy the traditional wooden-ones - although they cost a fair bit more.

My mother's used the same mold to make ang ku kueh for so damn long that it's almost literally breaking apart from how many thousands, millions of times, we've slammed it on the kitchen table to knock the buns out after pressing them... but as a child, there was nothing more fun than slamming it on the table...

 

not my favourite chinese kueh

 

Interesting video.......

Certainly not a simple dish.......a labor of love!

 

Wow, those are not something you throw together at a moments notice!!

I noticed the wooden mold she had on the table was the same peach or heart shape as the one I have.

 

Straits Chinese cooking and desserts is not something you can do in an hour. It takes all day to do stuff like that. I've been doing it since I was a kid.