The evolution of mooncake
People either love or hate this treat eaten during Asian Mid-Autumn Festival The mooncake made by Soirette has a macaron centre and flavours like crème brûlée.
MasterChef Canada champion Eric Chong remembers celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival at his grandfather’s house in Richmond Hill.
The elder Chong’s cooking for the East Asian holiday inspired Eric, coowner of Toronto’s modern Chinese restaurant R&D, to pursue a career in food.
“My grandpa would always cook massive feasts and our whole family would go to his house,” Chong says.
“I never understood why we were celebrating, but he said we were just ‘thanking the moon.’”
The highlight of the evening came when the meal was over. Heavy pucks of dense mooncake, resembling small rounds of brie only square-shaped, were cut into wedges and served from a decorative metal tin.
Chong and his brother Andrew gobbled up the fudge-like slices that their grandfather would pick up in Chinatown. “We absolutely loved mooncake.”
I also grew up eating and enjoying mooncake. I enjoy the texture — it’s slightly grainy filling — and the light sweetness. It isn’t cloying but is sugary enough to satisfy. Inside, the salted duck-egg yolks play off the main sweet filling, which is encased by a thin flour-based crust.
Like Chong, my knowledge of the festival’s meaning was superficial.
I knew it was related to the moon, not only because of the pastry’s name, but my mom would tell us to gaze up and admire the moon — which always seemed to glow its brightest that day.
I later learned that the salted egg yolk centres symbolize the round mid-autumn moon and the festival marks the farming season’s harvest, making me appreciate the holiday even more.
Mid-Autumn Festival, traditionally celebrated by Chinese and South- east Asian Cultures (Thailand, Malaysia also celebrate), takes place on the 15th day of the eighth lunar calendar month and always coincides with a full moon. This year it falls on Sept. 24.
I was in university when I discovered that my much enjoyed mooncake is the Asian cuisine’s equivalent of fruitcake.
In 2006, I was an exchange student in Copenhagen — a land more or less void of any Chinese culinary authenticity at the time. So I was surprised to find mooncakes at an Asian grocer just before Mid-Au- tumn Festival.
Excited to share a piece of Chinese culture with my Danish dorm mates, I bought a square and sliced it up in our communal kitchen on the evening of Mid-Autumn. Too polite to voice their thoughts, they instead showed it with silent nods and forced smiles as they attempted to swallow their displeasure.
A few years later I moved to Hong Kong, where many of my peers were expatriates trying mooncake for the first time.
“It tastes like sand mixed with a crystallized egg,” said one Texas- born colleague. “It took a very tall glass of water to even swallow one bite.”
At the time — the late 2000s — bakeries in Hong Kong were in the midst of a mooncake revolution.
Whether it was to make the treat more universally appealing, to reflect consumer demands for healthier varieties or simply a natural evolution of a traditional food item, mooncakes were modernizing and are now made of any dessert or anything sweet.
I have eaten varieties made from chocolate, ice cream and cheesecake, filled with or flavoured by macadamia nut, green tea, apricot, black sesame, red bean, purple yam and durian.
The most popular of this new wave is the “snow-skin” mooncake with a thin mochi-like exterior and typically a lighter filling such as custard or creamy fruit.
Shobna Kannusamy, a Cordon Bleu-trained pastry chef, has been making light mochi-skin mooncakes for more than five years at her Vancouver-based bakery Soirette.
“I grew up in Malaysia and remember the festival fondly as a kid,” says Kannusamy, who begins developing new flavour combinations months in ad- vance of the holiday.
This year, Soirette’s mooncake lineup reflects Kannusamy’s home country with flavours including kalamansi and jackfruit.
Soirette is also in collaboration with the Holt Renfrewhoused Colette Grand Café in Vancouver featuring macaron centre mooncakes in flavours such as crème brûlée and vanilla or Earl Grey and lemon.
Back in Toronto, the EuroAsian bakery Bake Code puts its own twist on mooncakes with a “molten” egg yolk centre and trendy fillings.
Canadian grocery stores including T&T Supermarket are also importing more of these new varieties, including lowsugar offerings.
But still, I’ll always have a soft spot for the densest wedges of mooncake I can find.