To add even more fun to the Mid-Autumn Festival this year, I bought several different flavors and styles of mooncakes, a staple of the holiday, and organized a taste test for my family. The rules were pretty simple: to participate, you had to taste each of the mooncakes and then rank them from favorite to least favorite. For those of you who have never tasted mooncakes, let’s just say these little pastries offer a unique set of flavors to the western palate. “Vile,” is a word I’ve heard some friends use – I believe unfairly – to describe these holiday treats, but luckily, everyone in my family enjoys a good mooncake once a year.
The traditional Cantonese mooncake and one commonly found across China, Hong Kong and Singapore, is comprised of a thin outer pastry – the thinner the better – filled with lotus paste and an optional egg yolk or two. The egg yolks retain their roundness inside the cake, resembling a full moon and representing completion or wholeness in Chinese culture. Egg yolks are importantfor providing extra good fortune to the recipient; in fact, molds I found were even stamped with the characters for “double yellow.” Accenpting that we may forfeiting some luck, my family prefers those without a yolk.
I thought up the idea of the taste test as I walked around Chinatown, amazed by the variety of mooncakes I saw. Durian, raspberry, star fruit, red bean mooncakes – the list was endless. Perhaps these diverse flavors existed in Beijing and Hong Kong, where I’ve lived the last five years, but I must have missed them. In Singapore these new flavors and their flashy bright colors abounded.
Unfortunately, I had to exclude a nutty mooncake from the taste test, which tastes a bit like a fig newton, because the shop identified by a local guide as the “Best Cantonese bakery in Chinatown” had sold out of them – five days before the holiday commenced. I did appreciate, from the same guide, a tip on where to find a wonderful Hokkien bakery, where the mooncakes were much larger and flakier than their Cantonese counterparts.
In the end, I brought home a classic Cantonese mooncake filled with lotus paste (minus the yolks), a pig shaped pastry designed for young children, the traditional Hokkien version, and a chocolate mooncake. I tried to exclude the mango version from the competition because only Elisa and I had tried it, but my daughter insisted it was her favorite nevertheless. When then votes were tallied, there was no consensus. I preferred with the classic Cantonese, followed by the pig; Elisa liked the mango, followed by the classic; and Erik preferred the chocolate, followed by the Hokkien. Maybe next year, we’ll be brave enough to try the durian.
Read about more food adventures on Wanderfood Wednesday.