Moon Cakes!

Ellyn

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Fortunately, these are not made with actual bits of moon in it. I've heard that the moon is made up of the same boring rocks that we'd find in the earth's mantle, silicone and quartz and polar iron and such, so it wouldn't be that good to eat.

Moon cakes (yue bing...not sure if that's a literal translation) are traditional Chinese cakes with a fairly thin and pliable, not particularly fluffy crust. It's more of a skin than a crust, and gives a little neutrality to offset the immense amount of dense paste that serves as the filling.

Authoress Amy Tan wrote in her big breakout hit novel The Joy Luck Club about a rabbit-shaped moon cake where the filling doesn't go all the way up to the ears. I'd like to see that! Usually, however, these cakes are equilateral circle or square shaped with elaborate "stamps" to mold the top with Chinese characters, and brushed with egg to give it a sheen. They're about palm-sized, and a couple of inches tall--and, as I earlier mentioned, there is a lot of filling so moon cakes are rather heavier than a snack or average dessert!

Moon cakes are traditionally eaten during the autumnal moon festival (naturally) that celebrates this folkloric woman who lives on the moon welcoming her archer hero husband once a year or something and also there is a rabbit. Moon cakes are also a Chinese New Year traditional food, which is why that's my favorite holiday.


I got caught in the rain today and ducked into a Chinese food store that I go to, on rare occasions, for their pickled plums, and I was immensely pleased to find that they stocked up on an assortment of different moon cakes--out of season, too!

My personal favorite filling is one made out of lotus seed paste, which is delicate and sweet. Sometimes it includes a hard-boiled salted duck egg yolk, which offsets the sweetness superbly and adds some granulated texture.

Other fillings include mixed nuts in sticky syrup, which I'm not too fond of because it usually has a little too much texture. The nuts aren't supposed to be finely chopped, so: this is a snack that can bite you back. It's an endurance trial to me to eat the whole thing, especially with standard-sized moon cakes. Nut lovers, I'm sure, can go nuts for this.

I've heard that red mung bean filling is also common, but I haven't had the privilege of trying that, and the store I hid in didn't stock them. They did, however, have sweet black bean paste filled moon cakes, that I also never tried before, so I had one of those while waiting out the rain. In my opinion the black bean filling's strong flavor overpowered the crust, and as a filling it can be prone to drying up--so, personally, nothing beats a gentle lotus seed filled moon cake yet. (Also, mung beans grow like weeds where I live, so I can't think of the filling as something special for a special occasion, but that's a minor factor that wouldn't matter if it just tasted great. It tasted okay, just too strong in my opinion. Still worth a try!)
 
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