Baking equipment happiness

At this stage I've been able to go through Global Baker, choosing recipes that don't require any specialised equipment or equipment that I don't have ... or recipes that involve dough, because I despise dough.  It didn't used to be that way, but my Global Baker journey is becoming littered with the corpses of failed doughy things.  It's torture because usually the only thing wrong is dough failure, but the tastes and smells are amazing.  I'm left imagining how wonderful it could have been while I have a cry into my cup of tea and bust open the vanilla wines.

But, equipment.  My pattern is go to through my book, pick recipes that I want to try before others (usually because they look easier than the other recipes because I am that person and I never learn, and because my failure rate with this book is really beginning to disturb me), make sure I have what I need to make them or else add the ingredients not to hand to the grocery list and go from there.  I'm inching towards the recipes that need me to also collect equipment though, and so I'm starting to take note of what I'll need along the way so that I can put that on my wish list. 

I mentioned to the husband the other day that I want to try mooncakes (I'm very fond of a fruit mince pie, and these are fruit mince mooncakes.  I also wonder if it would be possible to make lemon curd mooncakes.  We will find out.  If not, I can just eat the lemon curd and no harm done) but I'd need a mooncake mould.  I did a half-arsed search online through the usual baking equipment avenues I take, but came up blank.  Paying no attention whatsoever to the big picture in the book of a mould laying next to the finished mooncakes (probably because it wasn't at all what I envisaged when thinking of a baking mould either), I was to be honest looking for your bog standard pressed tin or whatever mould.  Like a madeleine tin.  Bless.  I did say it was a half-arsed search.

It's nothing like your bog standard anything, however.  It's a whopping piece of carved wood.  And absolutely beautiful.  A couple of days after logging 'mooncake mould', the husband was in an Asian grocery in town and came across one and it now lives in on the mantle because it just does not want to be in a cupboard.  So, mooncakes are on the menu as soon as I get some fruit mince for my first run at them (and lemon curd for my second).  I will make fruit mince in due course (there's a recipe for that with the recipe for the mooncake bit), but since dough of any description is intent on killing me just now, I'm going to concentrate on that in the immediate.  Plus, the forward to the mooncake recipe says you can buy good quality fruit mince 'for an easy life' and I'm all about the easy life right now, so I'm taking that as a pass.  And I have the flu so I'm feeling unbelievably lazy.  I don't know if it's because I'm getting older, or because the germs go through some kind of vicious mutation process as they pass through the small children before getting to me, but it seems to hurt more these days.

Horrible mooncake mould photo is courtesy of my ipad, because I have no idea where the camera is.  And I couldn't take decent photos on that either.  (also, it's about 40mm thick.  Seriously whopping).