Red bean mooncakes

So, on my quest to make mooncakes from scratch this year instead of buying them for $20/4pc.. I soaked some azuki beans in water for 2 hours, drained off the water, then proceeded to boil them at a simmer until they were soft. I blended them into a soppy paste with some lard and sugar, except the paste has too much water in it. Hmm.. and, the paste is of a purplish hue instead of dark red -- like what you'd get out of canned, sweetened red bean paste. The recipe I'm using isn't for the faint of heart. There's lard in both dough mixes. Mmmm.. lard.. Well, these look pretty darn strange coming out of the oven. Since I didn't use an egg wash, none of the mooncakes retained their mould image. The crust is about right, a little on the thick side and not sweet even though I added about 1/8 cup sugar to the outer crust recipe. 

The purple azuki bean paste looks pretty purple, so maybe for the next batch I should use the canned red bean paste instead. Maybe there's a video on this somewhere of how to form these things. The instructions I have suggest to put the fold side into the mould so that the fold is imprinted, but that's just all wacky. 

Here're the ingredients: 

One 14 oz package of azuki beans

water 

3/4 c. lard 

1 c. sugar 

Water-lard dough: 

2 c. unbleached white flour 

5 tbsp. lard 

10+ tbsp cold water 

1/8 c. sugar 

Flaky dough: 

1 c. unbleached white flour 

5 tbsp lard 

This batch yielded 12 malformed mooncakes. 

For this recipe, I used duck lard and while the dough faintly smelled of roast duck (kao ya), the taste didn't stay with the pastry after baking. I ended up using more than 10 tbsp water with the water-lard dough just to get the dough to come together. The bean paste doesn't taste all that sweet because I misread the recipe. It originally called for 1 3/4 c. sugar. Now that I've gone through the process once, I think that a bit of powdered sugar can be added to the water-lard dough without it drying out too much. It would impart more sweetness and still be a dough. The ratio has yet to be determined.