A belated Happy Mooncake Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, to all who celebrated. How many mooncakes have you eaten so far?
I think I have eaten quite a lot this year, more than I ever did in the past. My niece, Ah Hong, brought back a few mooncakes in different flavours when she came home from Singapore for a short holiday recently.
She asked my daughter-in-law, Amelia, and I to choose one each. I chose a date-flavoured mooncake and promptly ate it the next day. It was my first date-flavoured mooncake, and I found it quite nice — not as sweet as I had expected.
Amelia chose a white lotus mooncake with salted egg yolk, a classic and delicious choice for the Mooncake Festival. It is her favourite. She later brought the mooncake to a family dinner she and my son, Tzen, hosted.
Ah Hong said mooncakes were very expensive in Singapore. Yes, they can be surprisingly expensive there, particularly those sold by hotels and luxury bakeries. There are several reasons for this, including their positioning as premium festive gifts, the cost of ingredients, professional chefs and labour, elaborate packaging, branding and Singapore’s generally high operating costs.
Many Singapore hotels market mooncakes as premium festive gifts rather than ordinary pastries. The packaging can include elaborate boxes, fabric bags, leatherette cases or reusable jewellery-style boxes.
Premium mooncakes may also contain double salted egg yolks, macadamia nuts, pistachios, truffles, bird’s nest, premium chocolate or other speciality ingredients. These cost considerably more than traditional lotus-seed or red-bean fillings.
Hotel mooncakes are also often handmade or produced in relatively small seasonal batches, with recipes developed by professional pastry and Chinese chefs. All these factors add to the labour and production costs.
A significant part of the price is effectively the gift experience. Some boxes are deliberately designed to be reused as jewellery cases, vanity cases or other containers. Add Singapore’s high labour costs, commercial rents and other business expenses, and the price can quickly rise.
So, when you buy a premium mooncake in Singapore, you are often paying not just for the mooncake itself, but also for the ingredients, chef, hotel brand, presentation and gift packaging.
We Sarawakians are very lucky that we can still find reasonably affordable mooncakes in a wide variety of flavours in our supermarkets.
This year, I yearned for mixed nut mooncakes — traditional mooncakes filled with a rich mixture of chopped nuts and seeds.
They are generally nutty, crunchy and slightly sweet, with a more textured filling than smooth-paste mooncakes. The combination of nuts, seeds and candied ingredients gives them a complex, slightly savoury flavour.
The filling usually contains walnuts, almonds, cashews, peanuts, sesame seeds and pumpkin or sunflower seeds, combined with candied winter melon, dried fruit and syrup, which helps bind the mixture together.
Mixed nut mooncakes are among the older and more traditional varieties. I grew up eating them in Sibu, and my late father also loved them.
Before the festival, I visited a few supermarkets in Kuching and was overjoyed to find mixed nut mooncakes in one of them. One packet of four cost around RM12.
There were also mooncakes in other flavours, such as red bean paste, lotus seed paste and durian. I learnt that these were among the most popular and classic mooncake flavours enjoyed during the festival. But I did not buy any of them. I only wanted the mixed nut mooncakes. All the mooncakes were made in Peninsular Malaysia.
When I finally tasted the mixed nut mooncakes, however, I was a little disappointed. The traditional mixed nut mooncakes I remember eating in Sibu used to contain pork. Pork lard was commonly used in the filling or pastry crust to bind the
ingredients together and give the mooncake a richer, more savoury flavour. The mooncake I bought had no pork lard, so it did not taste quite the same as the ones I remembered from my childhood.
In the office this week, I was also among the Sarawak Tribune staff who received a free white lotus mooncake, thanks to a generous donor who wanted to share the festive joy.
Friday was the actual day of the Mooncake Festival, but I could not have a Mooncake Festival dinner with my son, Tzen, and his family because I was working.
On my way home at around 8.30 pm that day, I was caught in a traffic jam along Jalan Song. The Malaysia-China Friendship Park was crowded with people celebrating the festival and carrying lanterns.
The Malaysia-China Friendship Park was one of three MBKS parks hosting simultaneous Mooncake Festival celebrations, alongside Hui Sing Recreational Park and Kenyalang Traffic Garden.
When I asked Amelia whether my grandsons, Raidon and Kenji, were at the Friendship Park, she replied, “No. Didn’t bring them because it was crowded and hazy. They only played with some lanterns at my parents’ house after dinner.”
I thought that was a wise decision by Amelia and my son.
Amelia later shared pictures of her parents with my grandsons and her elder sister’s children, as well as pictures of her elder sister, Lydia, with her children. There were also pictures of the children playing with lanterns and candles.
Looking at the pictures, I was reminded that although family celebrations of the Mooncake Festival had changed quite a lot over the generations, the central idea of family reunion and togetherness remained.
In the past, families would usually gather at home for a reunion meal, followed by moon-gazing, drinking tea and eating mooncakes. The tradition continues today, although busy work schedules mean some families may celebrate on a convenient evening rather than strictly on the festival night.
The Mooncake Festival is also surrounded by several legends that have been passed down through generations. The best-known is the story of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess.
Chang’e was the wife of the legendary archer Hou Yi. According to the story, Hou Yi was given an elixir of immortality after shooting down nine of the ten suns that were scorching the Earth. He did not want to become immortal without Chang’e, so he kept the elixir at home.
One day, while Hou Yi was away, a man attempted to steal it. To prevent the elixir from falling into his hands, Chang’e swallowed it herself. She became immortal and flew to the Moon, where she remained separated from Hou Yi.
When Hou Yi looked up at the bright full moon, he could see Chang’e and deeply missed her. He placed her favourite fruits and cakes on an altar as an offering.
My friends, did you see Chang’e when you looked at the moon on Friday night?
