Mooncakes, At Last

So I’m late on posting the mooncakes… by well over a month. But it’s still something worth mentioning. Or at least posting all the pictures I took.

They were selling them all over Chinatown- in the bakeries, on the street, in carts, in cars… okay, maybe not in cars. But you never know. My dad picked this up while I was circling around for some quasi-legal parking.

No clue what this says, but you have to like food that comes with its own utensils. I know that this is give as a gift for the Mid-Autumn festival, but is there any special ceremony that goes with eating it? Why add a knife and fork to the box if you’re just going to bring it to someone’s house… surely they have those things?

Sure, I could look this up… but eh. Just some thoughts.

Pretty, no? They remind me of Hopia, which I’m guessing is the Philippine take on these mooncakes. The writing on the top there? Not sure what it says, but I’m guessing somewhere along the lines of “live long and prosper.” Oh yeah… I threw in some Spock knowledge.

There are several types of fillings for these mooncakes, and luckily I ended up with a mixed nut one. I had read about some having  duck eggs in the middle, which freaked me out. Not that it should freak me out, because an egg is an egg. But mooncakes traditionally are made with duck eggs. And I associate duck eggs with balut… and that’s for another time.

I didn’t have anyone to give this to, let alone share this with, so I made myself a pot of tea and celebrated. It wasn’t as sweet as I thought it would be, and had this weird taste to it. There was something jelly-like, something crystallized. I’m not sure what kind of nuts were in this, but they didn’t help much with the taste. In short, not my kind of thing.