For all you Chinese guys and gals, you know what that means right? Yes, you get to eat tons and tons of mooncakes till you drop dead from exhaustion or get choked with too much lotus paste in your mouth. It is kind of sad to realize that nobody knows what is the Mooncake Festival all about. I guess everyone thinks that the Mooncake Festival is a festival where everyone just eats mooncakes. But that’s not the real story about the Mooncake festival. It’s actually called the Mid-Autumn Festival (some even called it the Lantern Festival because kids go around with lanterns and get burnt by candles). It is the Festival celebrating the end of mid-summer harvest(where in the past, farmers are the prominent livelihood of the people) and is meant to bring together the family (just like the Lunar New Year). And it is usually that time of the year where the moon is the brightest and hence the people look at the brightly lit moon and say “Cool, let’s make a cake that looks like the moon”. Of course, the people back then didn’t know that the moon was spherical so that made it into a disc like pastry. Okay, so now you guys know the truth about it. Does it make eating mooncakes more meaningful? No? Well…..

If you ask me why they use Lotus Paste, I have no idea. Probably it was cheap, widely available in China at that time and it is sweet. You see, life is sometimes as simple as that. Taking something cheap and easily available and then making it (with superb marketing) super expensive and laughing all the way to the bank (or to the metal box hidden under the bed).

Anyway, what I am more interested is to find out which stores/shops sells the best mooncakes. I know that the hotels and big bakeries are selling high end mooncakes like those with flaky skin, yam paste mooncakes (which I like very much), durian mooncakes, snowskin mooncakes, crispy mooncakes (yes, it’s available in Singapore), ice-cream mooncakes (also my favouritet as well), chocolate truffles mooncakes, cheese and raisins mooncakes, cempedak (taste a bit like jackfruit) mooncakes and more. The variety of mooncakes available is just staggering. Sometimes I get so spolit by the choices available that I just buy the original, saving me the headache of choosing.

And some of these mooncakes can be rather expensive, especially if you purchased from the hotels or restaurants. Those by Haagen Dazs, Goodwood Park Hotel and Raffles Hotel can set you back 50-60 for just 4 medium sized pieces. Some of those with egg yokes are even more expensive. I wonder what is so expensive with salted yorks? They are selling those 3 for S$1 at the market!

If you like mooncakes, have you wondered why you can’t find any when it’s not the Mooncake Festival? Why can’t I have mooncakes on normal days, why do I need to wait till it is the Mooncake Festival to eat mooncakes? Come on, tell me why? During the mooncake festival, everyone jacks up the prices till it becomes like some sort of 100 caret diamond gold “bun”. And traditional mooncakes are basically just lotus paste with covered with brown coloured pastry. You can find those in many stores in Singapore. Just that those they are selling are not cakes, more like buns. Those are cheap too. Have you wondered why changing it from bun to cake, the price goes up like 10 times? It doesn’t make sense right? My god, what are these business people doing?