Mooncakes galore!

It's Mid Autumn Festival or some called it the Mooncake Festival or Lantern Festival again (Oct 3, 2009). Traditionally it is a festival of harvest celebrated by the people of East Asia for thousands of years. The mooncakes and the rest of the stuff came in later. It is one of the most important festival apart from the New Year's Festival because it is considered a festival of reunion.

It is my most favourite festival since I was young. No matter how poor we were at the time, my parents will always scrap together some money to buy us some lanterns, mooncakes and cooked up a feast and we would celebrate the festival together.

For some reasons, I always discovered that the moon during this festival is exceptionally round, bigger and very bright. Maybe it was just a psychological effect.

Some of the common activities that we did at that time were:-

• Set the table and have our meal under the moonlit sky
• Moon and stars gazing (this is more than 25 years ago before we got the unhealthy and thick smog from Indonesia - spank you very much!)
• Eating mooncakes and pomelos and drank tea
• Lit the lanterns and hung them all over the place - trees, clothing line etcetera. (It was magical...)
• Carried lanterns and explored the countryside neighbourhood in the night (Watching the coconut trees sashayed gently in the cool evening breeze under the moonlit night - that was quite romantic actually :D )
• Sharing the stories, legends and myths related to the festival

By today's standards, the activities we did were considered boring and dull. But still we had more fun during our time compare to the city kids nowadays. I guess that was because we led a simple and uncomplicated lives during those days.

Of course, there were less variety of mooncakes in those days. All we got was
the lotus paste fillings (the most luxurious and very expensive) and the red bean ones. Also they came with limited choices with either plain fillings with watermelon seeds or with salted egg yolk in the middle. In later years, we also tried to make some of mini mooncakes with red bean paste as the fillings but the it was a tedious process (remember we do not have food processor at that time and we only got a small 24cm round portable oven).

Nowadays, we can get so many varieties and flavours due to the constant improvisation and creativity. I was equally amazed that the local bakeries in City of Sails managed to produce so many types of different mooncakes. You can get the baked one and chilled ones (non baked) from the shops. In terms of crusts, you can have either the jelly, glutinous rice or the traditional pastry (chewy, flaky or tender). As for the taste, a new range of flavours had appeared throughout the years (the base of the filling is still bean paste, except ice cream and fruit ones) and some of them are as follows:-

• Ice cream (all flavours) - by Häagen-Dazs
• Coffee
• Green tea
• Cream cheese
• Ginseng
• Bird’s nest
• Meat floss (usually chicken)
• Tiramisu
• Pandan
• Durian
• Mango
• Pitaya/Dragon fruit
• Yam
• Curry
• Chocolate
• Peanut
• Coconut
• Five kernels (five types of nuts)

This year I had the chance to celebrate the festival (the first since I came to NZ) with my relatives. Apart from having a big feast, we sampled 12 flavours of mooncakes altogether. Sadly, the weather over the last few days in the city is overcast and stormy, so we cannot enjoy the moon. (It is still raining outside as I type)

Anyway here's a gallery of different types of mooncakes found in the market.