However, Amazon sometimes sells Kee Wah mooncakes that you can have delivered via Prime! In San Diego, try 99 Ranch or Huy Ky Bakery in City Heights. In the United States, your best bet is a Chinese bakery or grocery store. However, mooncakes are sold in larger bakeries year-round. I’ve seen people stress out about the packaging as much as the quality of the mooncake itself. In Asia, luxury hotels, bakeries, and restaurants offer beautifully-packaged mooncakes for pre-order before the festival. Snowy mooncakes are also shareable but since they’re tinier… whether you share is up to you! Where to Find Mooncakes A cup of jasmine tea helps to digest them. Traditional mooncakes are about the size of a fist and incredibly rich. Regardless of appetite, it is difficult to eat an entire mooncake. Yes, I realize that I forgot to do this in the above photo. Slice it into eight pieces (eight is an auspicious number in Chinese culture) and share it with loved ones. The most traditional way to eat a mooncake is an auspicious one. The two smaller mooncakes on the right are snowy mooncakes. Cassia flower with oolong tea and melon seed.Pandan and white lotus seed paste with melon seed (our favorite).Sample Modern Mooncake FlavorsĮven my then daughter dug into mooncakes that we sampled recently at Four Seasons Hotel Singapore. They are smaller, unbaked, and more colorful than traditional mooncakes. The filling inside is usually sweet (chocolate, ice cream, or similar) and void of a salted egg yolk. They have a chewy, glutinous rice crust-similar to some Japanese manju-that is also stamped with auspicious Chinese characters. Maybe it’s because I associate cake with sweetness, but snowy mooncakes are my favorite. Cantonese-style mooncakes, which we are used to, have the golden crust usually surrounding lotus paste or melon seed paste and up to four (it’s usually one) salted egg yolks that represent the four phases of the moon. The paste filling is typically lotus seed, jujube, sweet bean or a nut blend.Īs you might imagine, each region of China has a slightly different mooncake variation that is usually seen in the crust. The filling and yolk are encased together by a thin pastry crust stamped with the Chinese characters for longevity or harmony. Gifting mooncakes conveys how you feel about someone, and you want to get it right! Traditional MooncakesĪ traditional mooncake has a salted egg yolk in the center that is surrounded by a paste filling. Deciding where and what to order is a big deal. Hotels, restaurants, and bakeries start taking mooncake orders well in advance of the festival. Sweet mooncake options have made them more palatable to a mainstream audience. However, they have evolved beyond just the traditional standard salted duck egg interior. Some savory mooncakes are certainly an acquired taste. My husband brought these treasures home daily-gifts from appreciative clients-in the week or two before the festival. Perhaps the most notable Mid-Autumn Festival tradition is the exchange of mooncakes, a seasonal delicacy that is now offered in various sizes and flavors. See also: How to Make Easy Chinese Lanterns Gifting Mooncakes Here, the Mid-Autumn Festival is the second-largest holiday behind Chinese New Year. The dragon is 67 meters long and lit up by 70,000 incense sticks. If you are ever in Hong Kong, you must visit the lanterns in Victoria Park and see the fire dragon dance. Lanterns play off the need for light because Mid-Autumn Festival events occur in the evening in order to fully admire the moon.Ĭonveniently, because celebrations run late into the night, the day after Mid-Autumn Festival is a public holiday in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. Ornate, colorful lanterns are hung in storefronts and homes with huge displays gracing public spaces. Lanterns Play a Key Role in Mid-Autumn Festival
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