Mooncakes are my favourite Chinese sweet apart from oni (a concoction of mashed taro/yam with lard and sugar). They are eaten during the eighth lunar month in the lead-up to the Moon Cake Festival (aka Mid-Autumn Festival) … supposedly secret messages passed in these cakes helped overthrow an oppressive regime. And then there was something about the Moon Goddess.
In a multi-cultural and multi-religious environment, halal mooncakes are now commonly available. In fact I like them better than the classic lard ones … they’re less oily, less sweet and of course … whatever oil is in them isn’t going to clog your arteries as badly as lard.
The pictures below give you a sample of the common varieties that take the same basic shape but with different fillings. The most common filling is red-bean paste. Mum says unscrupulous cakeshops simply mash taro and add sugar and Chinese black ink (traditionally squid ink) … it’s far cheaper than red bean mash.
There are a couple of less common forms:
- Delicious lard cookies (pictured below) which my grandma would send to us from Sibu, as it is a type native to the Foochow people who live there.
- And then there’s the one that looks like chalk … highly refined bean-flour mixed with icing sugar and compressed into slabs. Mmmmm.
Read more about the festival at Wikipedia.
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- Len-yong, a paste made from lotus seeds. A variation with some seeds.
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- Len-yong, a paste made from lotus seeds. It’s probably the most common after red bean paste.
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- Ngo-jin. My favourite … it has lots of nuts, seeds and candied winter-melon. A variation of this is called Hoi-thui and has Chinese ham added.
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- Delicious lard cookies.
