Of Mooncakes

We're on the eve of our first Chinese holiday here in Hong Kong: Mid-Autumn Festival. It is essentially Chinese Thanksgiving which celebrates the bounty of the fall harvest and is a very family-oriented holiday.

There are three things you need to know about Mid-Autumn Festival.

One: we have two days off of school. (Yes!)

Two: there are lanterns hanging everywhere; many of them lit. Very cool.

Three: mooncakes, mooncakes, and more mooncakes.

A couple of weeks ago, we started to notice an increase in subway advertisements and t.v. commercials about mooncakes. Last week, we noticed that stores –grocery stores, bakeries, dollars stores, hardware stores- started stocking boxes and boxes of mooncakes. The stacks spilled out onto the sidewalks. It was then that we finally made the connection between the holiday and the mooncakes.

Mooncakes are a traditional part of the Mid-autumn Festival. People give them as gifts and serve them as desert or treats. They're a little smaller than a puffed-up hockey puck. They have a thin pastry exterior, a dense, bean-paste core, and at the very center there is usually a filling, the most traditional of which is an egg yolk. They came in a wide variety of styles and flavors.

In the ads they look delicious. I had my first one today.

It was okay.

It was really dense, rich, and not all that sweet. Julie’s comment was “Not worth the calories.”

And they’re not cheap. One mooncake can run you US$2 to US$4. The word is that after the holiday is over, you can’t give them away. I think we’ll wait until then, to truly give them a fair sampling.

Mooncakes have an indefinite shelf-life which makes them the fruitcake of Asia. It's an open secret here in Hong Kong that mooncakes are regularly re-gifted.

It’s rumored that there is one box of four mooncakes out there that has been in circulation since 1983.

If that particular box lands on my desk, I will be sure to forward it to you.

-Jack