Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!
(Delicious) Lotus Seed Paste filled (I think?), Guangdong-style mooncake from the CAPS office!
You’d be surprised by the quantity and variety of these desserts in China. My father’s side of the family is Chinese so I thought I was pretty well acquainted with them, the sorts that come in fours inside elaborately decorated tin cans shipped from Hong Kong and bought at Chinese supermarkets in Flushing. Two weeks into my internship, I realized that my knowledge and familiarity with the mooncake culture was severely deficient. For example, just three weeks ago, I was first acquainted with the concept of meat-filled mooncakes, which I was convinced were poseur mooncakes, but turned out to be this legitimately delicious, densely packed pork…cake thing. Hao Laoshi, one of our Chinese teachers, gave us mooncakes that she had shipped all the way from Yunnan, which had cubes of meat mixed with rock sugar (I think?) with a pastry crust that had a flaky consistency that was different from other mooncakes I had before. Then, you have the mooncakes that flood offices at our internships, which range in types of size (there was one that was as big as a pie), filling (said pie-sized mooncake was filled with a lot of things, maybe like a 八宝月饼？）, and style (Adi brought home a huge selection of ice cream mooncakes, one of which had lychee ice cream in a chocolate shell….SO GOOD).
I’d like to warn mooncake consumers to steer clear of Weiduomei’s French-style Mooncakes, which are A. not mooncakes and B. not delicious. They’re sad crumbly poundcakes filled with strawberry jam. STEER CLEAR.
