The crepe paper lanterns with simple floral designs are beloved too. You get Godzilla, Superman, Batman and even all the Avengers. There are even musical ones with flashing lights. You get LED lanterns and plastic lanterns, using LED lights and light bulbs. These days lanterns have become more newfangled. Dragons, phoenixes, chicken, goldfish and even dinosaurs. They could be made of colourful cellophane paper and crafted into many shapes. The festival is also called Lantern Festival (sharing the same name with the festival celebrating the end of the Lunar New Year). Mid-Autumn Festival will not be Mid-Autumn Festival if you forget lanterns. I used to collect the plastic baskets as a fun way to see how many pastry piglets I’d eaten! Piglets in pretty baskets. These delicious pastries are either eaten plain or filled with mung bean paste. Sometimes, the piglets start appearing way before the festival, even right smack in the middle of the Ghost Month! Now, besides the piglets, there are also carp and butterflies. Everyone knows that Mid-Autumn Festival is on its way when they see clusters of these pastry piglets in colourful plastic baskets hanging at local bakery shops. People living in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore and Malaysia, also enjoy baked pastry in the form of piglets. Traditional mooncake makers will stamp the top of the mooncake with Chinese characters indicating various flavours: single-yolk, double-yolk, lotus bean paste etc. Sometimes, you get four salted egg yolks. Some are even savoury with minced meat! My personal favourite is the Cantonese mooncake with a rich salted egg yolk right in the middle of the pastry. You get Hokkien mooncakes with seeds and orange peel, Filipino hopia filled with mung bean, Teochew and Shanghainese ones with crusty pastry. The fillings are mostly sweet, but they could be savoury or made of minced meat as well.Ĭantonese mooncakes are not the only delicious mooncakes available for sale during the season. The shape is often round or circular, symbolising family togetherness and reunion. Depending on which part of China you hail from, mooncakes come in various flavours, though the most common flavour you see being sold in the markets is Cantonese (Southern Chinese). Mooncakes are sweet rich baked pastry filled with red bean or lotus bean paste. Mooncakes! Mention Mid-Autumn Festival and you immediately think of mooncakes. The festival falls between late September to early October. It usually falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. Other Asian cultures have their own harvest festivals too like Tsukimi and Chuseok. Mooncake fans are spoilt for choice!Ī harvest festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated by Asians and the Asian diaspora, for example the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Mooncakes appear in the supermarkets and restaurants, diverse and with many flavours. These days, where I live, Mooncake Festival preparations start even before the festival itself. Happy childhood memories are filled with beautiful lanterns, playing with candles and nibbling on lotus bean paste mooncakes. Right after the scary Hungry Ghost Festival or Ghost Month, it is a lovely festival celebrating family gatherings, enjoying sweet mooncakes and admiring the full moon. Of all the Chinese festivals, I love the Mooncake/Mid-Autumn Festival the most.
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