Mooncake madness

MILLIE: Once a year I look forward to receiving mooncakes in celebration of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. For the last 10 years or so, my friend Vicky Choi never fails to send six boxes to make sure each one of my siblings have their own and the sixth box was exclusively for my dad.

Vicky’s mooncakes would be specially ordered for us from Hong Kong, which we would eat as dessert or a snack. My sneaky sisters would come around at lunchtime to partake of our mooncake, probably because they knew we had double their share. My favorite is the traditional lotus paste with salted egg yolk and I would share the red bean variety with family and friends.

Mandarin Oriental’s Chinese executive chef Hann Furn Chen prepares to demonstrate how to make handmade mooncakes.

Last year, we had an abundance of mooncakes as Candy Uy of Gloria Maris Restaurant sent two huge boxes — one each for Karla and myself — and we were eating mooncakes for weeks. She sent a variety of flavors like white Linyong, which is the best-seller, green tea, strawberry, taro, mixed nuts and sweet corn. This year the new flavor is almond — yum.

This year, the Mandarin Oriental, Manila sent us 18 varieties of signature mooncakes prepared by executive Chinese chef Hann Furn Chen and the best-sellers are mixed assorted nuts, chestnut paste and pine nuts, durian paste with melon seed, green tea-flavored lotus paste with salted egg yolk, and the white lotus paste and Grand Marnier chocolate, pineapple and osmanthus syrup, red bean paste and melon seed, taro paste and salted egg yolk, milk custard paste and raisin, white lotus seed and egg yolk.

I zeroed in on the chestnut with pine nuts and Karla grabbed the white lotus paste with Grand Marnier chocolate.

KARLA: Mooncakes are given to friends and family in celebration of the mooncake festival. The mooncake festival is also known as the Mid-Autumn Festival or Lantern festival celebrated during the 15th of the eighth lunar month. The festival is based on a Chinese myth about Chang E, the Moon Goddess of Immortality.

Salted duck’s egg yolk is placed on the lotus paste patty before it is shaped into a ball.

It is said that there was a time 10 suns appeared in the sky, which dried up their crops and rivers, and people were even dying from extreme heat. The emperor asked a mythological archer named Hou Yi to shoot down all the suns but his wife, Chang E asked him to keep one to bring light and warmth. Hou Yi was about to shoot down the last sun when Chang E drank the immortal elixir and drank it in form of a protest. Chang E began floating towards the sky until she reached the moon and stayed there.

The mooncake festival is to celebrate Chang E’s beauty when the moon is at it’s brightest and roundest. It is said that mooncakes were also used to discreetly distribute messages or letters in the 14th century when the Han Chinese overthrew the Mongols. They planned the revolution by spreading a rumor that there was a deadly plague and the only way to be saved was to eat mooncakes. This aided in the dissemination of information.

It is also tradition for businessmen to offer mooncakes to their clients as presents. All my life, I’ve always known them to be gifts from our Chinese family friends and my family would fight over the salted duck egg yolk at the center of the mooncake. Mom and lolo would, of course, get first dibs on the egg yolks to the point that I never really got used to eating it. If ever I would find it in my part of the mooncake, I would immediately scrape it off and give it to either one of them. Sometimes, we would receive mooncakes with two yolks in it, which would make them both go crazy.

Mom and I got curious about how mooncakes are made and asked if we could request the Mandarin Oriental’s chef Chen to do an actual demo and he quickly obliged. The process is simple and one can actually bake these traditional Chinese pastries at home. The mooncake choices are grouped into traditional, snow skin and Cha Zhao style. The snow skin variety is coated with sweetened dough made from flour. All of the pastes used are imported and commercially available.

The mooncake ball is placed in a wooden mold with a fish insignia carved at the bottom.

MILLIE: Chef Chen showed us how to do the traditional oven-baked mooncake. For the pastry crust, he mixed the cake flour, all-purpose flour and custard powder in a bowl with the syrup, peanut oil and white lihia until the dough was thick enough. Chef Chen shaped a ready-made lotus paste into a ball and stuffed it with salted egg yolk. He then shaped the pastry dough into a ball with his hands and flattened it like a patty with his fingers and coated it over the lotus paste ball. The mooncake ball is placed in a wooden would with a fish insignia carved at the bottom. He presses it hard so that the pastry crust is crested with the fish insignia. 

Pounding the handheld wooden mold, he is able to loosen the pastry and when released, he reverses and voila! — a mooncake is made. The mooncakes are placed on a pan lined with aluminum foil and baked for about three minutes in a pre-heated (200 to 220 degrees) oven. After three minutes, the mooncakes are brought out of the oven and brushed on top with egg wash consisting of two egg yolks and one whole egg, lightly beaten. The mooncakes are then placed in the oven for another three to four minutes until golden brown. Freshly baked, the mooncakes are made to rest or age for two to three days and are reversed daily so that the oil is absorbed by the crust. That’s what makes the mooncake shiny.

Mandarin Oriental Manila takes pride in its special mooncakes in 18 different varieties to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival.

The most popular variety, according to chef Chen, is the white lotus and the most expensive is the mixed assorted nuts. My sister’s Xavier moms group mate Lynet Ng adores the black mongo or red mongo beans, which she buys from Diao Eng Chay or Shangri-La’s Summer Palace. I delight in Mandarin Oriental’s white lotus with the salted egg yolk. For me, the chestnut is superb!

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