Festival Takes the (Moon) Cake

Photo by M.C. Anderson

Moon cakes imported from Hong Kong are available at many Bay Area markets.

BY M.C. ANDERSON

On the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, which this year falls on Oct. 5, Asian Americans will pay homage to ancestors, exchange gifts and feast at banquets--and for many of them, moon cakes will be on the menu.

Bakeries all over the Bay Area are displaying trays and trays of the caloric drum-shaped confection, "round like the moon," says Los Altos restaurant owner Larry Chu.

The celebration is an especially big deal in Hong Kong, where it's known as Chung Ch'ui. Candlelit paper lanterns light up streets during the three-day celebration, says Chu, also a chef,cookbook author and cooking instructor who lived in Hong Kong for three years. At this time of year, moon cakes are as big in Hong Kong as are candy canes at Christmastime; just about every business and household distributes them to employees and family members.

"We have Christmas clubs here in the United States. There, in Hong Kong, they have moon cake clubs,'' Chu says.

The cakes, typically filled with sweet bean paste, offer infinite variations designed to bring luck--additions or substitutions of salted duck egg yolks, ham, double-yolked duck eggs, vegetables, fruits. Hong Kong moon cakes are considered among the world's best --and the former colony each year exports confections to many Bay Area supermarkets and around the world.

Like the cakes, the festival itself is widespread and varied throughout Asia. In Korea, the occasion is known as Hangawi or Ch'usok; in Vietnam, it's called as Trung Thursday. Vietnamese regard it more as a children's holiday, and for Taiwanese, the occasion calls for picnics where pomelos are served with moon cakes.

Explanations about how the moon festival started are almost as varied as the varieties of moon cakes. Ling Hsu, a volunteer at the Buddhist Tzu Chi Association in Oakland, remembers being told as a child that a Chinese emperor's lost love, who died tragically, became the goddess of the moon. Still others say that the Chinese, looking at the dark side of the moon, saw a rabbit that was able to make a potion for immortality, so the festival became a celebration of the rabbit's birthday.

Whatever the reason, moon cakes have continued as a mainstay of festival traditions. Bakeries in Chinatowns all over the country are churning out the cakes, and supermarkets (including May Wah Trading Co.and Sunset Super market in San Francisco) offer stacks of boxed moon cakes, both domestic and imported, often in metal boxes elaborately decorated with renditions of flowers, emperors or delicate patterns. Popular brands include Saint Honore Cake Shop Ltd., Banh Trun and Wing Wah.

Chu happily counts himself among the moon cake-struck. "I have 10 boxes already, and I don't know what to do with them,'' he says with a laugh. "I've bought at least 50 boxes for my employees.''

The standard-size moon cake is three inches wide and about one inch thick, although mini-cakes, about two inches wide and an inch thick, are becoming increasingly popular. Typical Cantonese-style fillings are lotus seed paste, black bean paste or yellow bean paste, which is cooked, pureed and put through a sieve and then mixed with sugar until ideally reaching the consistency of Play-Doh, Chu says.

Depending on regional customs, cakes might instead filled with red-bean paste, prunes with walnuts, mixed nuts, or pineapple ... fillings vary depending on country. Among Chinese, a popular feature is a glistening steamed salted egg yolk, sometimes two, in the center of the cake. When the cake is cut into quarters, as is traditional custom, the yolk looks like a round moon--and it balances out the sweet filling with a salty taste.

All this is wrapped up in an outer-crust made of an oil-based flour, put in a mold and baked. Each cake has an imprint on top--a moon, a woman in a moon, a flower, or even a rabbit, Chu says.

The chef explains the makings of a marvelous moon cake: "The crust should be as light and thin as possible, and moist; the paste should not be too sweet ... and not dry. A mediocre or bad cake has dry filling and a doughy thick crust. And the egg yolk should have a thin sheen of oil and should be shiny golden yellow.''

Moon cake quality varied in a thoroughly unscientific survey of San Francisco shops in Chinatown, the Richmond and the Sunset. Many places, which shall remain unnamed, offered mediocre moon cakes with dryish fillings and duck yolks, and doughy crusts that had the flavor and consistency of Pop Tarts. Fillings were cloyingly sweet, with gummy textures, and chalky aftertastes. Many tasted of artificial flavoring.

There were winners--among them the one store-bought brand I tried, from Hong Kong's Saint Honore Cake Shop Ltd. Packaged in a bright red oblong tin, it was a collection of four pairs of mini-cakes: egg yolk with white lotus seed paste, egg yolk with lotus seed paste, pineapple and red bean ($18 for eight cakes total). Each cake is wrapped in airtight plastic, accompanied by a tiny food preserver packet and one wrapped plastic knife.

The crust passed the moistness test, the egg yolks has the right degree of oil, and the bean pastes were rich and not too sweet. Watermelon seeds added to the red-bean cakes provided a nice crunch. Indeed, the only clunkers among the eight were the pineapple-filled cakes--solid, almost jammy concoctions that seemed overly sweet, with only a slight tang of fruit--a fellow taster compared them to a "perfumed eraser.''

For locally made cakes, you'd be hard-pressed to beat those at Chinatown's Eastern Bakery and New Maxim's Bakery. Regular-size moon cakes cost $3 to $4, minis go for 50 cents to $1. Maxim's sweet nut cake had big hunks of nuts and a pleasant variety of candied fruit ... "more like a granola bar with coconut, sesame seeds'' was one opinion. And although its yellow bean with egg yolk cake was a bit on the dry eggy side, it had a nice salty taste that balanced the richness of the bean paste.

When owners Elaine and Orlando Kuan purchased the bakery, they also received the previous owners' generations-old secret family recipes for moon cakes. For years, the bakery has taken the cake for variety, with a wide range of fillings including various fruits and meats, some with egg yolks--The cakes are so popular, in fact, that the Kuans sell them year round and distributes half a million moon cakes locally and around the United States, including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles.

The Kuans say their lotus-seed moon cakes sell best--they order 20 tons of lotus seeds at least 45 days prior to the festival just to meet the demand. In my tasting forays, I missed out on that kind, but managed to taste four others. Though the crusts in all cases were moist and delicious, the winter-melon cake proved the least impressive--it came off as bland and dull, though to appreciate it may require an acquired taste. The mixed fruit with ham and egg yolk had smoky pork notes, which lent the cake a savory dimension that jarred slightly with the fruit. On the other hand, the red-bean paste moon cake boasted a rich, almost carmelized flavor, and the coconut cake was very chunky, with plenty of pleasant roughage.

Julie Soo contributed to this
report.

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