Eating Gold

While the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is still some time away, you can already find the one thing that is always associated with it in plenty of shops: mooncakes. My wife and I absolutely love mooncakes! There’s just something about the whole blend of flavours that make the mooncake so appealing to us. And there’s a lot to choose from as well. Gone are the exclusivity of just the traditional fillings of the mooncake like lotus paste, red bean,mixed nuts and the ubiquitous orange egg yolk. Nowadays, there’s pandan, white lotus, green tea, the less sugar variety, and others which I can’t really recall. There’s also the jelly kind of mooncake, which I’ve tried but I don’t really like.

But, call us traditional because my wife and I prefer the originals. Nothing like a good mooncake filled with soft lotus seed paste, or one filled with all sorts of nuts. Just yummy! But don’t you like the ones with the yolk, you may ask? We like the ones with yolk as well, but we don’t really get them as they are so much more pricier than the others. My father in law once said that we might as well buy the mooncake and get a couple of salted eggs and take out the yolk. It’s basically the same thing, and you even get more lotus paste as an added bonus!

But, mooncakes are so expensive nowadays. Averaging RM13 ringgit for the plain lotus paste ones (cheaper for just the red bean), you might as well be eating gold! I mean here’s something that weighs less that 500g and you’re paying well above RM10 for it. There’s even the imported ones from Hong Kong which we can get at Tong Hing supermarket (a very old local supermarket chain) that costs over RM30. EACH! Brand name, Kee Wah. Now, I have never tried them, but are they so good as to warrant paying so much?

My wife and I just bought two at a supermarket just now. No, not the RM30 ones, but the more affordable ones, courtesy of my sister in law. We prefer the mooncakes from the peninsular as the local Sabah ones are not up to par, we think. We’ve tried Multi Bake, and Southern Bakery, the local bakeries here but we find the ‘skin’ of the mooncake either too thick or the filling is just not very nice. And they aren’t exactly cheaper than the ones we get from the peninsular. So, since they are priced similarly, we might as well get the ones from the peninsular, since they taste so much better. But even then, not all mooncakes from the peninsular are as good. We usually go for the more famous brands like Six Happiness, Kam Lun Tai, or Tai Thong (though among the three, we like Tai Thong ones the least – a bit too sweet for our liking). My wife tells me that the Hilton mooncakes are really good as well, though I’ve yet to try them.

My wife has just opened one of the mooncake packs. So I guess I’d better end this post here so that I can get my ‘fix’. Attack!