The Modern Mooncake

This is a long-overdue post about the Mid-Autumn Festival that happened here on 3 October. I meant to do a feature on mooncakes, the traditional sweet that is an essential part of the holiday. My plan was to buy one at the festivities in Victoria Park that evening (described at the end of this post), but I discovered that it was the one place in all of Hong Kong where you couldn't get one. Popcorn, ice cream, and cotton candy, yes, but no mooncakes.

The traditional mooncake is a thin pastry shell filled with sweet lotus seed paste. In the center is a salted egg yolk, which symbolizes the moon. Various auspicious characters (or perhaps less auspiciously, the name of the bakery) are imprinted on the top of the cake. The cake is very rich and dense; one cake is usually cut up into small wedges to share among several people. You bring these cakes in a decorative tin as gifts for your friends and family, whereupon they are often re-gifted to the next visitor. It's like the fruitcake of Asia!

A couple of days after the holiday, I tried to find some mooncakes that might have been languishing in a remainder bin. I was very surprised, however, to find that every trace of the mooncake had disappeared. For weeks previously, you couldn't go anywhere in the city without confronting an ad for mooncakes, and every major MTR stop seemed to have a special kiosk for selling them. Similarly, every grocery had displays set up throughout the shop. I had assumed that the holiday would linger like Christmas does in the States, where decorations and so on stay up well after it's all over.

At last, while scrounging around in the freezer section of Wellcome, I found a packet of "snowy" mooncakes made by Maxim's. These are the moooncakes for the modern age of calorie consciousness: they're smaller (about 3 inches) and with a less dense filling. They are also unbaked and served chilled.

Instead of lotus seed paste, the middle is a fruit-flavored filling. I'm guessing it was mango. Like most other Asian sweets, this one isn't particularly sweet or strongly flavored, so it was hard for me to tell.

I have no idea what was in the center. It was nicely creamy, but had only a wisp of sweetness or flavor.

I'm sorry I didn't get my mooncakes in advance of the holiday. Not only would I have liked to try a traditional mooncake, I would also have liked to sample a lot of the other modern ones. These modern cakes include flavors like pineapple, red bean, green tea, and durian. There are also savory mooncakes filled with ham. Haagen Dazs even has a version with an ice cream filling. Next year, I'll be ready.