My stars! Mooncake encased in new tradition

I’m back in Singapore, the country of my birth, here to celebrate a 50th year class reunion. But today is another special day, one that I would have forgotten living in the Washington DC area. Back here in Singapore, it’s very much a big festival.

It’s Mid-Autumn Festival, a wonderful festival celebrating the autumn harvest and the moon. The tradition is to eat mooncakes under the moon, sing songs about it and enjoy fellowship with family and friends under the bright moonlight.

There is a legend about Chang Er, a woman who sacrificially drank an elixir and floated up to the moon. Here she is depicted in a lantern in Chinatown. Go Google her, I can’t remember the details.

But I do remember mooncakes.

Back in the days, Mum would go to Middle Road and buy mooncakes from the one famous store there. One year, we heard that our old amah, Mo Sum, was helping to make mooncakes in Chinatown and we went there to buy them.

Mum always requested for those filled with four salt egg yolks and in lotus paste. I know, I know, Sandy, salted eggs in a sweet dessert would sound strange to my American friends but you can’t have the festival without mooncakes. Think eating bacon ice cream.

Mum would also sometimes buy mooncakes filled with pumpkin seeds or black bean paste, but we didn’t like them. Actually, full confession: I never liked mooncakes. I love the tradition, mind you. Especially the lighted lanterns that children walk around in the moonlight but the cakes? Its sweet and heavy and very fattening. Makes my face look like a mooncake. No, thanks.

However, we all loved the boxes they always came in. Square tin cans that everyone in the family wanted, to store precious, personal belongings. Made of tin, these mooncake boxes were always fun to collect and reuse.

During my outing, I found these shown here that resemble the tin cans that we had traditionally. These are made of paper but the old ones were tin cans usually in that bright auspicious, samo samo, orange-red-gold color. Often an image of Chang Er is depicted.

But my stars! How much the mooncake has morphed. And with it the mooncake tins and packaging. This is not new, of course.

When we were in Taiwan in the late 1990s, there were mochi mooncakes. When we lived in China in 2000 and were given mooncakes by friends, they were packed in beautiful and colorful paper boxes.

I haven’t celebrated this holiday in largely Chinese societies for years and have missed how everything has changed.

In Singapore there are now different, quite interesting, flavors. Beside the traditional lotus and black bean paste, they are now also filled with fresh durian, and lotus paste with rosemary honey, Singapore Sling, pandan flavor, kiwi fruit, passsion fruit, praline, chocolate. Irish creme and whiskey infused. Wow.

Yesterday, visiting long time friend Aw Seng with my sister Bette, I was treated to Durian Mooncake. The whole idea sounds quite revolting. Durian is that famous fruit that many people find so stinky that it is banned from hotels and airlines. But I found this mooncake quite delicious as I tasted the creamy, fresh durian encased in a soft mochi-like skin.

Yes, the new skin is called snowskin which is a soft, skin wrapping the durian or kiwi or whatever filling. The traditional pastry is a pasty, rather boring heavy wheat pastry, probably originally made with pork lard. Here are the traditional ones below:

These traditional mooncakes (above) are served at room temperature. But the snowskin ones are served chilled. Here is the snowskin variety:

Instead of the two traditional places that we used to go to, bakeries from several major hotel here have come up with their own versions and flavor, competing with each other.

And today’s boxes? Compare the traditional-style boxes above with these decorated and artistic ones. Enough renditions of Chang Er. Please let her rest happily on the moon. Who wouldn’t keep a container like that to use?

They’ve gone a step further. Look at the mooncake boxes I saw in Bugis Junction that my friends Brenda and Jackson Yap took me to. One was a tiny briefcase. Others could later be used as jewelry box, tissue containers and even a mini-fridge. Imagine our Easter hot cross buns sold in these.