Moon cakes

Autumn: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, according to Keats, who obviously never lived in Singapore.

Here, Autumn brings increasing humidity and the mid-Autumn festival, celebrated - of course - with food.  In this case, the moon cake. The mid-Autumn festival, also known as the moon festival, falls on October 3rd this year - the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when the moon is brighter than at any other point in the year.  As with most Chinese festivals, there is a special food associated with the event - in this case the moon cake, currently being heavily marketed in all its many forms.  The round moon cakes eaten on this festival are symbolic of family unity and closeness and come in all sorts of guises.  "Traditional " moon cakes are enclosed in a sweet(ish) pastry and contain lotus paste and whole egg yolk.  They are very heavy, and ususally served cut into tiny wedges.


The modern moon cake is encased in "snowskin" (much nicer than it sounds, basically a paste of baked white flour combined with icing sugar) and features all manner of fillings, like lavender, chocolate truffle, wheatgrass and melon seeds, hazelnut and coconut, green tea and of course, durian, to mention just a tiny number of the varieties on offer.  Singapore's hotels seek to outdo each other with their inventiveness every year.  How about "Almond Snow Skin with Premium Bird's Nest and Custard Paste" or "Almond Snow Skin with Advocaat Egg Liqueur Truffle and Black Sesame Paste" at the St Regis Hotel, or "Snow-Skin Apricot Mooncake with Popping Candy" from Raffles, pictured top left and described thus:  "luminous snow-skin encasing a velvety filling that yields apricot fragrance and a popping surprise! " 

My regular readers will know my feelings about durian - that most exotic and smelliest of tropical fruits - but nonetheless I decided to give the durian mooncake a try. Mistake.  I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth (or the smell out of my nose) until I had downed half a bag of spicy curry snacks and two cups of tea.  Just thinking about it brings back the smell.........

That said, I also have a very pleasant mooncake memory from this week, which centres around spending time with our new group of HR graduates, who have just joined the Bank.  I spent time with them as part of their training programme and took along some mooncakes to share.  The lavender snowskin went down particularly well, hence the colour of this post's text, as a tribute.

I must say, it was a real pleasure to spend time with such a great group of talented youngsters.  It's easy to become too focused on the day-to day issues of a job and forget about what it was like when everything was still in front of you.  What's in front of us this weekend is the Hari Raya holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan.  We're hosting a Sunday roast lunch in celebration, the first ever since we've been here, but the invitation seems to have struck a chord with our guests, so this may be the beginning of a new tradition on the Kiddy household.  I'll keep you posted!