Shall I Bring a Piglet Home With Me?

For me, an integral part of each Mid-Autumn Festival is the Takashimaya mooncake bazaar. This is the place to go to sample, under one roof, all the different mooncake offerings from most of the major food players in town – hotels, restaurants and bakeries both modern and traditional – plus, some foreign hotels and restaurants as well. Here, you get to discover what the “hottest” new tastes in mooncakes are for the year ; what the creative juices of the chefs have thrown up for the current festival. Deep in the labyrinth of its aisles, your spirit starts to soar with the infectious festive joy and excitement.

The fair is a heady, pulse-elevating, taste-buds-working-over-time experience. Stall after stall of mooncakes and more mooncakes! Tasting samples of all flavors, aromas and shapes are thrust at you from all directions. Your eyes work furiously to take in all the colors and textures. Your palate falls into a deep, swirling whirlpool of tastes and smells. It’s almost trance inducing. It’s intoxicating. It’s exhilarating. It’s pure gluttony - or gastronomy, if you prefer.

This year’s bazaar started on 9 September (and runs through to the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival itself, on 28 September). On the fair’s inaugural day, my mum was already anxious to go down and see what was on offer. She managed to convince me that, my incredibly jam-packed schedule not withstanding, I needed a break, and that I should go visit the bazaar with her during that said break. And so it was on that Thursday afternoon that we spent a hedonistic 1 hour at the fair, plunged headlong into an indulgent orgy of mooncake tasting.

The landscape of this year’s fair is dominated by a gold-colored, pagoda-topped pavilion, while red lanterns hang jauntily from each stall. It’s festive; it’s bustling; it’s exuberant.

Then there are the stretching aisles, lined on both sides with stalls.

Just row after row of stalls; almost 40 stalls - each offering a myriad of mooncake choices.

So, join me, as we take a whirlwind tour of mooncake fantasy-land…

Sitting regally and presiding over the festivities are the “traditional” (more on this later) mooncakes with a baked pastry crust. These come in all sorts of sizes, can be round or square and are filled with a plethora of different fillings - anything ranging from the traditional lotus seed paste and red bean paste, to things like green tea, pandan and red dates.

Actually, if truth be told, this year’s offerings in the baked mooncake category are rather tame, compared to years gone by. There are hardly any outlandish flavors to be found ; the most “cutting edge” one that I can see is Ritz-Carlton’s contribution to the innovation stakes…

Chocolate mooncake. Dark chocolate mooncake at that. Or, more specific still, Valrhona dark chocolate surrounded by a layer of white lotus seed paste before being wrapped in the pastry.

It’s an interesting idea – a marriage of East and West I suppose. But even for a dark chocolate lover like myself (who simply cannot resist all things dark chocolatey), I’m not sure the combination of tastes work all that well. The aggressive nature of the dark chocolate flavor completely overwhelms the rather delicate nuances of the white lotus seed paste. It feels simply like eating dark chocolate really. And I’m not sure I want that when I’m eating a mooncake; I want to be able to feel that I’m eating a mooncake, and not a chunk of Valrhona chocolate (as divine an experience as that always is).

Other than this, almost all the baked crust mooncakes are “safe” and well-known incarnations. And of all the ones I managed to taste, the one version of white lotus seed paste that had my eyes opening wide in pleasant surprise was the one that came out of the kitchens of Royal China at the Raffles Hotel. I have to say, their home-made lotus paste is quite quite exquisite – smooth, silky with an understated sweetness. The aromas and flavors are wonderful! It’s been a long time since a white lotus seed paste mooncake has made me sit up; this one did. I must have tried several dozens of mooncakes by the time I got to their stall, and their offering immediately woke my starting-to-feel-overloaded taste buds up.

While most restaurants and hotels seem content to stay with the tried-and-tested where fillings are concerned, some choose to innovate in the area of presentation.

The Mandarin Hotel takes gift-giving to a new royal level, with six mini mooncakes embossed with the design of a dragon. (I know, lousy picture; but I think you can sort of see an outline of the dragon from the drawing attached to the box.) In a society where gift-giving symbolisms can count for a lot, this is obviously a profitable marketing idea.

I suspect one of the reasons (and probably the main one) why there seems to be very little “push the envelope” activity in the baked mooncakes arena this year is that most (or at least a lot of) Singaporeans seem to like the snow skin crust more than the baked crust. I guess people like me, who simply will not touch anything snow skin, are decidedly in the minority.

What are snow skin mooncakes?

They are mooncakes with a non-bake crust made from flour and lots of shortening. These snow skin mooncakes have to be kept refrigerated.

Originally only available in white (and thus its name), they now come in all sorts of pastel (and even some not so pastel) shades.

They also come highly domed or in the regular mooncake shape.

There is a surfeit of snow skin mooncakes at the bazaar this year – all sorts of spandangled flavors (anything from peanut butter to ginseng, from pomelo to cranberry) in all hues of skin. But perhaps the one flavor that many of the merchants seem to have expended much energy on is the durian. This year, everyone seems to have gotten the same idea as to how to take this particularly South-East Asian (maybe even, peculiarly Singaporean) filling up several notches - by using pure durian paste, instead of mixing durian with lotus seed paste as was the case previously.

I like durian; but I’m not into durian mooncakes. Or snow skin mooncakes for that matter. So unfortunately, I’m not able to tell you how these taste.

Now, the one new snow skin innovation that has me breaking my “no snow skin” rule, and taking a taste, is this: black sesame snow skin.

It is intriguing. Actually, I think it is quite, quite inspired. It sounds obvious, yet no one seems to have thought of it before. This year, several stalls have this on offer. The toasted black sesame, worked into the snow skin, while not the prettiest of sights, gives the crust the kind of incredible aroma and fragrance that only toasted sesame can. Quite lovely.

Oh, and a quick aside: I think the above picture tells a succinct story… the more traditional mooncake juxtaposed with the more modern version. It shows how the Mid-Autumn Festival has evolved with the times, and yet has remained true to its roots in many ways. Okay, enough of the sentimental metaphors already. There are more mooncakes to talk about…

Another mooncake that Singaporeans seem to love is the Teochew crispy yam mooncake. It used to be that this could only be bought at the Crown Prince Hotel. Nowadays, many, many other hotels, restaurants and bakeries have jumped on the bandwagon.

While these crispy yam mooncakes can come in small, cute domes

…or large, handsome rounds… they are not all created equal.

The crust makes or breaks this mooncake; the filling is pretty standard. For a lip-smacking, ooh-and-aah-evoking crispy yam mooncake experience, the pastry has to be (in my opinion at least) crispy and flaky, yet melt-in-the-mouth tender, with hardly any sense of solidity or denseness to it. And… with a minimal amount of greasy mouth feel. The crust really has to be near perfect for this mooncake to be worth the eating.

And Eater Palace still seems to have one of the best ones around; surpassing even Crown Prince’s, in my eyes. I love the lightness of their crust.

Here are some fresh out of the deep fryer and left to drain (don’t remember which stall these were from).

Ugly picture… but I just want to show you the insides of the crispy yam mooncake. A smooth, rich paste of yam surrounds a salted duck egg yolk, and is in turn itself enveloped in a thin layer of delicate, flaky, crispy pastry.

Unlike the other mooncakes which usually do well with a few days (or even a week) of rest after being made – giving time for the flavors to deepen and the crust to mellow a little – the crispy yam is best eaten on the day it is fried. By the second day, the crust will have lost a lot of its crispy aromatic appeal.

This is another type of mooncake that I quite enjoy – the Shanghai-style mooncake. Unfortunately, it’s not a common sight in Singapore (and is more readily available in Malaysia instead). Wandering through the fair, I spotted an appearance at only one stall – Bengawan Solo. I guess their version is passable; I’m not terribly enthusiastic about their crust.

The key to a sublime taste experience is once again in the texture of the pastry – the lightness and tenderness of the crumb are critical factors. It should be crumbly with a light touch of crispiness and a meltingly tender mouth feel as it hits the palate. The amount of butter used also plays an important part ; too buttery and it overwhelms everything else.

These are another very popular variation. I think (though I could be very wrong in this) they are based on the Shanghainese mooncake, but given a Cantonese (or is it Teochew) twist.

Actually, I would put the point that they’re not really mooncakes; although they are treated as such – but only during the Mid-Autumn Festival at that! The rest of the year, they are available quite easily, and are known simply as “walnut tarts”, or sometimes “walnut pastries”. But come mid-autumn, they are “walnut moontarts”. Go figure.

Either way, I like these a lot.

I was particularly taken with the ones from this stall. I ended up taking quite a few home with me. A taste review will be in tomorrow’s post, so look out for that.

They were wonderfully fresh – just out of the oven, and placed into their cheery, auspiciously mandarin-colored paper cradles.

Oh, look at those mini piglets (bottom right hand corner). Aren’t they just the cutest?

Now, I’ve talked about my love of custard mooncakes before; of how I first fell in love with them in Hong Kong more than a decade ago.

In recent years, I’ve managed to get my yearly fix closer to home – from East Ocean Restaurant. So it was with great anticipation that I visited their stall at the bazaar. But oh dear! I felt a little let down. I had a taste of their custard mooncake. It was still as fragrant and aromatic as I remembered it. The custard was still as rich and flavorful. But what was this thick, somewhat gooey stickiness against the back of my teeth? I looked over at my mum, and she verbalized my exact thoughts. The stall attendant confirmed that it was still the same chef as per previous years making the mooncakes. My mum suggested to me that maybe it was because the mooncakes were still very fresh, and would settle down after a few days of storage. I was in two minds about getting a box and letting it rest at home. In the end, I decided I really wasn’t keen on that sticky feeling, and didn’t want to take the “risk” of bringing some home, and then finding that they stayed sticky. What was I going to do with a whole box of custard mooncakes then?

As we walked a little further on, I spotted the Peninsula Hotel stand. This is the grand-dame of Hong Kong Peninsula, and not our local Peninsula. Wow! This is a first. They have not participated in the bazaar before.

My heart leapt a little when I noticed that the only mooncake variety they were offering at the stall was the custard one. Ooh! Maybe theirs would be even better than the Zen one that I liked so much.

In appearance, theirs is rather different. Instead of the regular brown colored baked pastry crust, theirs is a bright eggy yellow with only a touch of browning along the edges. Hmmm…

The custard filling inside is an even brighter orangey yellow. Hmmm… again. It doesn’t seem quite natural for a custard, if you know what I mean. Taste-wise, the flavors are rich and full-bodied – very deeply eggy, with a certain crumbliness. Interesting…

I’ll leave it at that.

These ones I’m quite excited about – from Yang Hua Cake House (the same stall I got the walnut mooncakes from). The display name tag calls them “Hainanese Fusion Mooncakes”, although I’m not quite sure what makes them Hainanese, as opposed to another Chinese dialect group. In appearance, they are rather distinctive – at merely ½ inch or so in height, they are half as tall as regular mooncakes. This is the first time I’ve seen mooncakes shaped more like round discs rather than tall “cakes”.

I rather like their wu ren (mixed nuts) mooncake. It’s different from the “normal” wu ren filling, in that it is the candied winter melon that takes a more central role. In fact, the filling is somewhat reminiscent of lao po bing (wife’s biscuit), only with more nuts and sesame seeds mixed in. And I’m totally glad they have not put in any “Western” almonds – the most common ploy in wu ren mooncakes, to bulk up the nut filling at a much lower cost. While like everyone else, they do not use the much more expensive Chinese almond (lan ren - Mandarin; nam yan - Cantonese), I am quite happy with their mix of nuts. Flavor and texture-wise, almost everything seems in good balance. Of all the commercially-made wu ren mooncakes I’ve tasted so far this year, theirs have come closest to hitting the spot. Not quite like mum’s, but quite satisfying all the same. (Taste review with photos will be in tomorrow’s post.)

Isn’t this a sight for sore eyes? I think this is one of the most tempting sights… tray after tray of fresh-from-the-oven mooncakes sitting there in their full golden brown glory, awaiting new homes and new owners.

Interestingly, Yang Hua also has on offer a wu ren variant that has a flaky crust – but baked, and not deep fried. A unique idea; although the pastry tastes rather floury and bland I feel. I still much prefer the aroma of the regular baked crust

Now, these I want to share with you, not so much for their taste (I’ve never tasted them, so I’m not sure what they taste like), but for their value in nostalgia and sense of tradition.

You see, these are probably pretty close to what the “true” and original mooncakes looked and tasted like. Back in Ancient China, things like lotus seed paste and red bean paste were rare (perhaps even non-existent) luxuries for the peasantry. In those days, mooncakes were made of a simple flour and lard dough, wrapped around a little bit of filling made from more lard and some candied winter melon (which was cheap and accessible) for a touch of sweetness. There were also no pretty moulds with which to shape the mooncakes; instead they were rather rough-hewn, rustic creations with little thought for aesthetics or presentation. The most elaborate decoration was probably just the stamping of the mooncake with some red food dye to mark the auspiciousness of the food item. The concept of mooncakes then was obviously completely different from what it is today.

These ones in the picture (again offered by Yang Hua) probably rank highly on the true-to-tradition scale. I’m told that the filling is made from lard, candied winter melon and something else (I forget what). The dough is almost bread-like and is made simply from flour and more lard. The mooncakes are shaped into simple discs and baked until a deep, rich brown, and stamped with the traditional auspicious character.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: it is only in the last couple of decades that the mooncake, as we know it, has made its way back into China and mainland Chinese society. Sounds strange? Well, after the Communists came to power, all traditional Chinese festivals and celebrations were frowned upon. These came to be celebrated only by the overseas Chinese communities, particularly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South East Asia. In these places, many of the traditional festival foods evolved and changed with the times. Chefs, exposed to new ideas and cultures, created new “modern” versions of the traditional festive foods. While such foods became the accepted festival traditions in these overseas Chinese communities, they were in fact quite foreign to the China Chinese themselves! Festivals were probably still celebrated quietly, in private, and the food made in conjunction with these celebrations continued to be those of the ancient forebears. It is only with the reopening of China to outside influences that there has come a “reverse flow” of culture, if you like, back from these overseas Chinese communities to the mainland Chinese.

So, the baked mooncakes, all perfectly moulded into all sorts of designs with all sorts of “modern” fillings, and which we in this part of the world term as “traditional mooncakes”, are in actual fact a “modern” invention. So modern that the Chinese in China have only recently jumped on the bandwagon and started enjoying these versions, while abandoning the more rustic, truly traditional variants behind.

Here’s another truly traditional mooncake – this time Teochew style. There is that same simple, casual, rustic shape; but the pastry is flakier and lighter than the previous Hainanese one – the same sort of crust that is found in other traditional Chinese pastries like lao po bing (wife’s biscuit) and so on. I have to confess that this pastry entices me a lot more than the Hainan-style one.

These Teochew mooncakes come in huge “family size” versions or in smaller mini sizes.

Another great picture of the juxtaposition of the past with the present : the simple, clean, unpretentious lines of the traditional mooncake with its low-key tan color and just a splash of red for a bit of excitement, against the bright, “look at me” hue of the modern bing pi (snow skin) version, with its intricate design and detailing. Interesting, no?

While salivating over the various mooncakes at Yang Hua Cake House’s stall, I spot their Master hard at work, shaping and making the traditional Teochew mooncakes with nary a pause. With practiced ease, his hands move quickly and elegantly in a smooth, continuous rhythm, rolling, filling and shaping the mooncakes.

All the ingredients are neatly laid out in front of him – the dough, some already portioned out, whimsically shaped and waiting to be rolled out, and the fillings: lotus seed paste, red bean paste and candied winter melon. He even has bowls of the different types of nuts that are used in the wu ren mooncake on display in the corner.

Here’s a closer look.

But what really catches my eye are these, sitting on a tray tucked away in the back corner of the stall. These are balls of candied winter melon filling jauntily wearing a cap of red bean paste. What an interesting combination of tastes and textures! This is the filling that goes into their special traditional Teochew large la bing.

I watch fascinated as the Master continues to churn out a fully completed mooncake every few seconds.

First, a piece of well kneaded, artistically shaped dough is taken.

And quickly rolled out into a thin circle.

With smooth, graceful sweeps of his hand, and in a blink of an eye (too quick for me to capture on camera even!), he places a large ball of filling in the center of the dough. Then, cupping it in both hands, he gently and smoothly wraps the dough around the filling. His hands move eloquently around the dough, gently massaging and stretching it so that it spreads out to a consistent thickness around the filling. His experience ensures that the dough neither tears from being too thin, nor clumps up in unappetizing thickness. (And yes, I’m quite sure those are traces of red bean paste on his nails! )

Within seconds (definitely under 30 seconds) he has a smooth, round ball sitting in his palm.

A square of parchment paper is placed under the mooncake ball before it is gently flattened to create the characteristic disc-like shape.

Next, he dips four fingers into the bowls of black and white sesame seeds, then very carefully imprints the sesame seeds onto the surface of the mooncake.

The final touch: the auspicious red stamp.

I ask if he will hold the finished masterpiece up and let me take a photo of him. He almost blushes in embarrassment at the attention; then holds up the mooncake with a fair degree of pride and looks into the camera. But he was too shy to smile.

The newly shaped mooncake goes onto a tray, awaiting its turn in the oven. Above it sits its fresh-out-of-the-oven cousins, smelling gorgeous.

A round-up of mooncakes cannot be complete without talking about piglets. I’ve mentioned them before in my earlier post. These were traditionally made from scraps of mooncake pastry. Unwilling to waste the leftover dough, bakers gathered the scraps together and shaped them into small piglets. These were baked and sold as cheap Festival cookies for the children.

The traditional “packaging” for these pastry piglets is a small plastic basket. Why baskets in this context I’m not too sure. I do know that in the olden days in China, adulterous men and women (or was it just the women?) were each locked into separate bamboo pig cages (zhu long) and then drowned at sea. Why this tragic imagery should be evoked at a time of happy festivities, and in connection with an innocent snack for children, I do not know. Perhaps someone can enlighten on this?

Anyway, here’s a closer look at the piglets in a basket. Of course, these modern versions come hygienically wrapped in a layer of plastic before being placed in the basket, unlike in the days of my childhood when the piglets would oftentimes sit for a couple of days in the bakery shop, gathering a healthy layer of dust, before they are taken home and eaten.

These even more modern versions had me sighing with delight. They are so very, very cute! All chubby and adorable! They even have black, shiny eyes! And I just love that ribbon around their necks! I suspect that these are probably filled piglets – most likely filled with lotus seed paste. These piglets seem too round and big to be made up of only pastry and nothing else. They would be way too dense and hard to be palatable. And at the price that these are going for, and given that they come sitting so elegantly and demurely in a classy plum-colored gift-box, I’m sure they must be filled. So there you have it. Even the humble piglet has gone up-market – no longer just a hunk of plain, not-terribly-tasty pastry dough, and no longer simply residing in cheap plastic baskets. Instead they are now tasty full-fledged mooncakes, nestling luxuriously in tissue and living out of a new, swanky, high-class gift-box condo. Not bad for a small piglet!

I was so very tempted to bring a few piglets home with me. But I knew better. Every year, I am lured and seduced by their cuteness. Yet once home, I find them rather uninspiring in the taste department. While I adore the pastry crust of mooncakes, I like them in small amounts, and not in one hefty chunk. So this year, I resisted. I gazed longingly at these well-fattened piglets for a while, then turned and walked away, not daring to look back in case I caved in to their forlorn looks of rejection.

Instead, I went and picked up some traditional Chinese snacks.

Finally, what is the Mid-Autumn Festival without lanterns. Lanterns of all shapes, colors and designs.

I have so many fond childhood memories of choosing and playing with lanterns at each Mooncake Festival. In those days, all the lanterns were carefully crafted by hand, using pieces of fragile translucent colored paper stuck over a wooden frame. And when a candle was placed and lit inside it, gorgeous plays of color and of shadow and light mesmerized my young eyes. Nowadays, sadly, a lot of the lanterns come made of hard, unromantic plastic and worse still, are battery operated! No candles required! But, but… that’s what lanterns are all about, surely.

These ones catche my eye – lotus shaped lanterns that are still made from paper. A rather uncommon design I have to say. The more common ones are like the fishes hanging in the background (I can’t tell you how many of that design I had in my childhood!).

Unfortunately, for every paper lantern, there are several more gaudy plastic, battery-operated ones hanging near by.

Just looking at the lanterns… just being at the bazaar… tasting and sampling all the mooncakes… one can’t help but be caught up by and uplifted with a big, happy sense of festive exuberance. Yes, the Mid-Autumn Festival is definitely around the corner. In the meantime, I have eight more days to indulge and stuff myself silly with mooncakes!

Copyright © 2004 Renee Kho. All Rights Reserved.
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