Mooncake Festival

It is now September, and everywhere people can buy mooncakes. Mooncake is a Chinese pastry, traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus seed paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. They are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.[From Wikipedia]



Nowadays, the shops and hotels are diversifying their mooncakes to attract also the Western people (and Asians who do not like the traditional mooncakes). If the traditional sounds too heavy, you can also purchase the snowskin, which is basically a mooncake that is not baked and has a white or other colour skin that looks like marzipan (but is not). The filling was in the beginning also the bean paste or lotus seed. Luckily for us, there are now many variaties with insides of truffle, chocolate, champagne and even ice cream mooncakes.



(There is also a crusty mooncake on the market, we have not sampled that one but it looks ok. It does not have the nice "drawing" but looks a little bit like a round greek or turkish pastry, without the honey dripping off)

In 2005, Omar and I tried two mini mooncakes at the Raffles hotel which were very nice. We were not aware that you should eat only a small portion of it however (approx 1/8 pp), and as I can recall we did not need any dinner that night. Last weekend we wanted to try the mooncakes again and bought 2 look a like traditional mooncakes at the Vivocity Mooncake / MidAutumn Festival. One is a chocolate Cappuccino and the other a sort of Oreo mooncake. We adapted to the culture, cut off two small pieces and enjoyed them with some coffee after dinner. Apparantly not completely adapted because, mmmmmmmm chocolate is much better than bean paste....