Thanks, Cape Chef, for your reply. But I'm looking for a sweet filling for Chinese pastries that's based on Wintermelon. All applications I know and practice for wintermelon is savory (like your soup recipe). The sweet wintermelon filling tastes like tutti frutti but, as far as I can tell, has no additional flavorings, although some pastry makers do add in stuff like candied citron, nuts or waterchestnut. This I really don't care for as it interferes with the delicate flavor of the wintermelon and gives me the impression that the pastry maker is trying to cut corners by adding fillers to the filling. My mother said that this wintermelon filling was quite costly to produce because of the ingredients and the labor. But it's not like the pastry shops don't make it back. I remember making multiple trips to a bakery in NYC Chinatown when I was a kid just to stand in line in hopes of securing a box of mooncakes made with this filling. The bakery did not take orders so the public had to depend on luck or perseverence. No matter how much the bakery said they were making that year, they always ran out. We scored only a few times. The rest of the year, we bought a lesser pastry made with the same filling.
So, I've been trying to learn how to make this filling for a long time. I can't read much Chinese, but my father says that he hasn't seen recipes for this filling in cookbooks anyway. So I am hoping that perhaps someone who posts will be able to help me out. The reason I want to learn is because I want to see if I can make Pate de Fruit with it. Some day, when I take charge of a kitchen, I'd like to include such a treat on a gourmandise plate.
