Thursday, September 19, 2013

Moon Cakes

Yeeesh, it's been a busy week.  The Mid-Autumn Festival is here!  We get Friday off from work in Hong Kong this week.

This is a festival that traditionally celebrated a successful crop / harvest season and the moon, but in contemporary society is more about celebrating food and drink with family.  This has also become a festival of lanterns, whether carried by kids in the form of Angry Birds or various other cartoon animals, set aloft or downstream by teenagers with secret wishes written inside, or simply put on display in parks and public areas by municipalities.

In the weeks leading up to this holiday, moon cakes have been marking their presence around town - whether wrapped in Mandarin Oriental boxes and bags, paper birdcages, origami boxes, or decorated tin boxes.  There are moon cakes of every variety and type.  The most traditional are made out of red bean or lotus seed, with a big fat yellow egg yolk in the middle.  They are usually made out of molds that have some good luck greeting or lucky word carved on top.  I recently discovered the custard variety, which is a "reformed" mooncake that is a more modern twist on the traditional dessert.  They are so crumbly and lightly sweet and creamy....yummy.   I like those the best.


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