Most memorable mooncakes

During every Mid-Autumn Festival there's bound to be a least one news article commenting on the gluttony of custom to give mooncakes and much food is wasted from the mooncakes that are thrown out after the celebration. But on the positive side of this custom, I've recently heard of a new trend for people to donate unopened mooncakes (ones w/o boxes are fine too) to charities that redistributes them to the homeless or those who couldn't afford them.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a much bigger celebration here in HK than it is back in Toronto. Families get together and all go out for dinner. Afterwards dinner people will head to one of the many lantern festivals across the city (see my earlier blog post). And there's even a public holiday celebrating the day after the festival. But one of the best parts of this year's festival was all the mooncakes I ended up trying. In Toronto, I would have shared a traditional mooncake (w/lotus pasted and egg yolk) with family. This year I ended up eating lots of "mini mooncakes" that one could finish alone or share between two people.

Here's a list of my 7 favourite mooncakes:

#7 Taipan's mango and pomelo snowy mooncake

I believe Taipan was the first company to sell "snowy" mooncakes. "Snowy" mooncakes are basically frozen mochi desserts. I thought the filling of this tasted pretty good, reminiscent of the mango pomelo sago (楊枝金露) dessert. But I didn't really like their take on the pastry or the green bean filling. The pastry was a bit too dry and the filling was a bit too powdery for my tastes.

#6 Maxim's mango snowy mooncake

I was surprised the by the strong mango taste that came through this "snowy" mooncake. I guess they must have mix some mango purée into the pastry as well. This turned out to be a nice mango dessert. The filling is a mixture of green bean paste and mango purée, but the green bean taste was overshadowed by the mango in the filling and pastry.

#5 Arome's purple yam "snowy" mooncake

I really liked this version of the "snowy" mooncake. The pastry was soft and chewy and the yam filling was sweet and fragrant. This snowy mooncake also had a green bean filling but it had a nice creamy texture to it. The whole thing reminded me of a mochi actually.

#3 Kee Wah's traditional lotus seed paste mooncake

This was probably the largest mooncake I had this season, and took CharK and me about a week to finish it. We divided the mooncake into eighths and had one piece each time. It tasted pretty good--the pastry was flaky and the salted egg wasn't overly dried. I think it was a bit saltier but less sweet than the Wing Wah's traditional lotus paste mooncakes I use to eat in Toronto.

#2 Haagen Daaz's ice cream "mooncake"

These stylish desserts are pretty much chocolate coated ice cream bars which were molded into the shape of mooncakes. So not only were they very pretty, but they were also quite delicious--just like Haagen Daaz's regular ice cream. The strawberry "mooncake" I had tasted a bit like the strawberry Pocky sticks.

#1 Kee Wah's egg custard mooncake

These mini mooncakes are made with a traditional pastry and filled with an egg custard filling. The filling was rich and the pastry was flaky-yummy! Even though the "snowy" mooncakes were similar size to the egg custard mooncakes, the latter was much more filling. But the egg custard mooncakes weren't overly sweet as egg custard buns sometimes are, so this was a nice alternative to the tradition lotus paste filled mooncakes.

I felt really lucky this year to have been able to try so many varieties of mooncakes. I started eating the snowy mooncakes well before the actual Mid-Autumn festival, moving onto the ice cream ones as they were a gift, and finally ended up sharing a box of the egg custard and traditional lotus seed mooncakes with family during the celebrations.

There are still many more versions of mooncakes that are sold in HK and China,  including outrageous flavours like Durian and salted pork. But I'll leave those for another year...

Let's end with some trivia--do you know where the traditional of mooncakes came from?
A popular legend is that mooncakes were used as a means of communication to overthrow China's ruling dynasty Mongol dynasty, 元朝, (1271–1368 AD).

Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival in HK

Lights are a big part of HK's iconic night scene--from the thousands of neon billboards to the Symphony of Lights over Victoria Harbour. So it's no surprise the mid-Autumn festival celebrations included a number of lantern carnivals across the city. Traditionally, the mid-Autumn festival celebration includes moon glazing in a park and playing with hand carried lanterns (candle-lit). Today the city brings families together to celebrate the festival at local parks with elaborately designed, LED lit lanterns.

After braving the MTR crowds on Thursday night, we made it to Shatin's mid-Autumn festival lantern carnival at Sha Tin Park. A number of Family had blankets spread out on the grassy areas and shared mooncakes and played with glowsticks and homemade lanterns.

I was really impressed by the intricate details and the size of these lanterns.

My three favourite lanterns that were on display were:

#3: The traditional rotating lantern

The centre panel of this lovely lantern rotates to show different images (Photo:CathC)

#2: Bunnies admiring the vase

These bunnies staring the vase lantern were so cute (Photo:CathC)

#1: The 9-meter lotus showpiece

This handcrafted lotus lantern consist of 5 levels and each of the panels painted with Chinese scenes can also rotate (Photo: CathC)

Aside from these beautiful lanterns that lit up the park, there were also traditional round lanterns which dangled riddles underneath. These riddles are Chinese word riddles which are typically about facts and history around the mid-autumn festival.

If you guessed 5 of these riddles correctly, you win a prize (Photo: CathC)

It was a beautiful night in the park to enjoy the full moon and the impressive hand-crafted lanterns. Although I didn't play with any lanterns in the park, I bought a couple to decorate my flat with. Two AA batteries operate these LED.lanterns and they are decently bright. The starfruit is my favourite because the tissue-paper like material makes it very delicate and pretty to look at.

My goldfish and starfruit lanterns (Photo:CathC)

Happy mid-Autumn Festival!

A bus ride across town

My aunts and uncles keep telling me how enjoyable bus rides are in HK because there's so much to see along the ride. So today I decided to see the view for myself and took the bus across town from Tseung Kwan O out to Shatin. I was surprised to ride in such an empty bus on a weekend; I practically had the entire second level of the double-decker bus all to myself!

The bus ride turned out to be a nice change from my usual MTR rides, as I got to see more of the local streetscape. HK is a city built with a series of intertwining overpasses. Actually, this is one of the only places I've been to where crossing the road often requires going through a bridge or a "subway" (隧道).

Taking the 798 bus route to Shatin (Photo: CathC)

The 798 bus route also goes through the Tseung Kwan O tunnel, Kwun Tong Bypass, and finally Tate's Cairn Tunnel. Along the way I got a pretty nice views of the Victoria Harbour skyline facing the Hong Kong island side,

Another busy weekend for cargo ships (Photo: CathC)

and also the former Hong Kong Kai Tak airport international airport. Currently, Kai Tak is a cruise ship terminal for a variety of cruise ships traveling across Asia.

The site of Hong Kong's former Kai Tak Airport (Photo: CathC)

About 40 minutes later I arrived in Shatin.

Asia's first Snoopy's World at Shatin's New Town Plaza (Photo: CathC)

This canoe behind the clock is actually a ride (Photo: Cath)

After today's trip, I see that that buses can be a pretty good way to go sight-seeing around the city on the weekends. (These double-decker buses are usually filled with commuters during the weekdays). At least, you can see the different scenery of the city as you travel from one part to another. The only downside of buses is that they come less frequently than the MTR, so I probably wouldn't use to as a means of hopping on and off between sites.

Jazz on a rainy afternoon

The local malls are popular venues for concerts during the summer time. I guess it's a good opportunity to showcase new talents and also draw people into one of the numerous malls across the city. Yesterday I stumbled into a mall outside of Tsim Sha Tsui to find shelter from the rain, and was in time to catch the Gimme Live concert series.

There was a "roped off" area in front of the stage and a bunch of concert organizers were walking around the area trying to get people to come into the area and watch the show (rather than from other areas of the mall). I guess because there is a lot of shopping options in the area, this particular mall didn't seem too busy. The concert organizers had a very hard time drawing a crowd for the performances. I must have been asked 3 or 4 times as  I walked around the shops by the stage if I wanted to enter the 'roped off' area to watch the performance. The show didn't start until almost half an hour after it was originally planned for, so I decided not to watch from the roped off area, but at places randomly around the mall instead.

A summer concert at a local mall by Tsim Sha Tsui (Photo: CathC)

Although I wasn't too familiar with the artists there were a good number of fans that were present, as you can see from the pretty signs some of the fans had made. My favourite group was Indica Trio. This jazz trio had a really energetic performance.Plus the saxophone player had some really terrific improvisation. Overall I enjoyed the show, which was a nice surprise as I had just happened to stumble into this mall to avoid the rain.