The best way to celebrate a dessert-oriented holiday.
After Chinese New Year, Mid Autumn Festival is probably the second most popular holiday season for people of Chinese heritage. After all, who can resist a festival centered around the giving and receiving of desserts, and moreover one that condones eating such desserts from day to dusk, including especially while gazing at the moon? 😛 In looking through our dessert archives on this dessert blog, we realized that we have not covered mooncakes all that much in the past — with only one post about mooncakes in each of Melbourne and Singapore. Allow us to rectify that asap!
In Hong Kong, mooncake season is one of a kind. One can place orders for mooncakes anywhere up to 3-4 months before the Mid Autumn Festival season itself, from an incredibly wide variety of places — local traditional Cantonese bakeries to the high-end hotels — and at a correspondingly vast array of price points. There are traditional Guangdong-style mooncakes wrapped in a thick dense crust the colour of a deep suntan, others crafted in a Suzhou style with flaky pastry, and still others cloaked with a mochi covering and then served ice-cold. There are mooncakes filled with traditional flavours such as red bean paste, white lotus paste, and salted egg yolks, and others with ice cream, chocolate, pork floss, and even more luxe ingredients such as caviar or bird nest. All that said, the most famous mooncakes in Hong Kong — and arguably the most iconic — has to be the Peninsula Hotel’s egg custard mooncakes. And when we were recently and unexpectedly gifted a box from a business contact, you can imagine how over-the-moon we were for this year’s Mid Autumn Festival, pun intended. 😀
Created almost four decades ago, the Peninsula Hotel’s egg custard mooncake remains one of the most sought-after mooncakes in the city even today. For this year’s Mid Autumn Festival, Spring Moon — the Michelin-starred restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel that is the birthplace of the original egg custard mooncake — carefully placed eight of these golden treasures inside a crimson box that evoked an art deco style intermingled with the linear lines of traditional Chinese architecture. The mooncakes themselves were bite-sized, with an outer crust so soft and buttery that they were prone to shattering if one was not careful in handling. We personally dislike mooncakes with a salted egg yolk inside, but these were different and exquisite — the inner hearts of sunset marigold egg custard were simultaneously slightly sweet and savoury. Unlike traditional Cantonese mooncakes which are typically consumed at room temperature, these mooncakes needed to be heated slightly before serving. Do note that egg custard mooncakes are also available from the Peninsula Hotel’s namesake patisserie bakery, but they are not the same.
Dessert adventure checklist
- ☑ Dessert destination: Peninsula Hotel’s Spring Moon, Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon side.
- ☑ Budget: $$$ (HKD 668 for eight mooncakes).
- ☑ Sweet irresistibles: Traditional Cantonese dessert.
- ☑ Must-eat: Egg custard mooncake.
- ☑ The short and sweet story: The best way to celebrate a dessert-oriented festival.
Dessert Correspondents 