Mooncakes & white rabbits: a little taste of the Mid-Autumn Festival in Kuala Lumpur

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In a country with no seasons, I mark the passage of time through celebrations and holidays. So when I start seeing mooncakes everywhere, I think, Oh it's the Mid-Autumn Festival again. How time flies!

Before moving to Malaysia, I couldn't have told you what or when the Mid-Autumn Festival was. It wasn't really something my family celebrated when I was growing up in rural Canada. Mooncakes did make an occasional appearance in our household, and I'm sure my mother would tell me why they were there, but I was more interested in eating them than understanding irrelevant cultural traditions. 

And so it might have remained, had I not scheduled an appointment last week with my hairdresser, Jeff the Genius (as I call him), and had Jeff not happened to be working at a new salon in Bangsar Village 1. For within sight of my salon chair was a stall called Kampar Mooncake - the only place Jeff buys his mooncakes from, because apparently, they're that good.

"You've come at just the right time," he said, "They only set up last week and they'll be gone soon, because Monday is the Mid-Autumn Festival!" 

This last bit was news to me. In my defence, I hadn't passed by any mooncake displays at my local mall, nor had any Malaysian friends brought mooncakes to recent parties. 

So now I knew the 'when' - but I still didn't know what exactly the Mid-Autumn Festival was, or how the moon's role in it differed from that in Chinese New Year.

"Do, um, people also eat mooncakes during Chinese New Year?" I ventured, forgetting that I had never witnessed such a thing. Jeff burst out laughing. "No, they eat completely different things!" (Not for nothing is my blog called Clueless in KL.) 

He then proceeded to plug some gaps in my knowledge, and after speaking with a few more people and doing a bit of online digging, I am now very much the wiser.

Eight things I've learned about the Mid-Autumn Festival

1. By tradition, the Mid-Autumn Festival is the second most important Chinese festival, after Chinese New Year, with both revolving around family reunions. 
2. Both festivals follow the lunar calendar, but while Chinese New Year falls on the new moon of the first lunar month, the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the full moon of the eighth lunar month. 
3. Specifically, the Mid-Autumn Festival takes place on the fifteenth day of the eighth month (which doesn't always coincide with the full moon). That's why Chinese people call it bayue shiwu - literally 'eighth month fifteenth'.
4. Both festivals also follow the solar cycle and the seasons, as the traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar. Chinese New Year (aka Spring Festival) marks the coming of spring, while the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the autumn harvest.
5. The Mid-Autumn Festival is much more moon-centric than Chinese New Year. It originated in the worship of the harvest moon, which is supposed to be the biggest and brightest of the year (not always true). Besides a lavish reunion dinner, families traditionally celebrate by praying to the moon, gazing at the moon, and eating mooncakes and other offerings made to the moon.
6. There are many moon-related legends surrounding the festival, but the most popular is about the Moon Goddess Chang'e. In one version of this tale, Chang'e drank her husband's elixir of immortality to stop a thief from stealing it; reluctant to ascend to heaven without her beloved husband, she flew to the moon instead, in order to be closer to him. In another quite different version, Chang'e stole the elixir and fled to the moon so her husband couldn't find her.
7. Lanterns also play a big role in the festival, with many colourful displays and parades. KL's Thean Hou Temple - a six-tiered complex dedicated to the Chinese sea goddess Mazu - is one of the top places to visit at this time of year: you can wander through courtyards aglow with lanterns, attend lantern-making workshops, take part in mooncake tastings, and watch cultural performances.
8. Efforts to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival have waned (ha!) over the years. My friend Angel attributes this to modern life, with busy schedules and families living further apart. Additionally, it's not a public holiday in Malaysia. But one custom that people continue to follow, in a big way, is the exchange of gifts - particularly mooncakes. 

Mooncakes unwrapped

Jeff and I spoke extensively about mooncakes as he cut and coloured my hair. We both liked the ones with lotus seed paste, which is the most traditional filling. We also liked the ones with red bean paste, another classic. And we agreed that salted duck egg yolks - which typically accompany these fillings - were awful. 

Next thing I knew, Jeff had bought me two mooncakes from the stall downstairs - in the flavours I liked, sans yolks - accompanied by a nice hot cup of tea. It wasn't the first time he had fed me, and I was once again touched by his thoughtfulness.

"The mooncakes come from Kampar, near Ipoh," he said, "They're really traditional, made without artificial colouring or preservatives, and shipped in fresh every day."

I devoured both of them on the spot, batting away the cord of the hairdryer and occasionally eating my fringe as Jeff attempted to blowdry my hair. (Yes, I did offer to share, if you must know.)

These were far and away the best mooncakes I had ever eaten. They had so much filling, encased in a thin, albeit tender, layer of pastry. The red bean paste was a deep maroon - almost black - and satisfyingly rich and dense. The lotus paste was even more decadent: sweeter, stickier and more moist. Both were studded with large white, crunchy melon seeds, providing contrast in colour and texture. Jeff said melon seeds are traditional, but I'd never noticed them before - maybe because they had never been this big nor this plentiful. 

My friend Alan - who knows a thing or two about mooncakes, being a baker and an all-round foodie - was impressed by the pictures I showed him later. 

"The dark colour of the red bean paste means it's been cooked long enough to caramelise," he said. "And see this?" He pointed to where the pastry had pulled slightly away from the filling. "It means it's fresh; if it isn't, the moisture from the filling starts to seep into the pastry, making it cling."

Jeff took me to visit the Kampar Mooncake stall afterwards. Despite the name, it actually sells Kam Ling's Mooncake, from Kam Ling Restaurant in Kampar, Perak.

There were many discoveries in store for me. One was mooncakes with double yolks, which I had never seen before. Alan later said some have four yolks! 

Image credit: Kampar Mooncake

Another surprise was mooncakes with nuts and ham. I thought it was some weird fusion concoction, but Alan said it's very traditional, made using Jinhua ham - a dry-cured Chinese ham with a history spanning over 1,000 years - mixed with five types of nuts and seeds.

Image credit: Kampar Mooncake

There were some modern twists too, like green-coloured pandan paste mooncakes. Pandan is a tropical plant with fragrant leaves that smell a bit like vanilla. There were also 'snow skin' mooncakes, which had many of the same fillings as the traditional ones but were made using translucent white mochi. You can find so many innovations these days - for example, flavours like durian, chocolate and matcha; alcohol-infused fillings; and mooncakes made with jelly or ice cream. 

Image credit: Kampar Mooncake

Image credit: Kampar Mooncake

I also saw 'kung chai biscuits', which I remember eating as a kid - but had no idea they were made from mooncake pastry. The name means 'doll biscuits' in Chinese, because they usually have fun shapes like fish, pigs and flowers.

Image credit: Kampar Mooncake

There were some random pomelos amongst the mooncakes; I thought they were fake props - leading Jeff to burst out laughing again. It turns out pomelo is a favourite food of the Moon Goddess, according to legend, and hence a popular gift at this time of year.

What surprised me the most was finding out afterwards that there isn't just one traditional style of mooncake but many regional variations! The one I know is the Cantonese mooncake - which is the most widely recognised in overseas Chinese communities. But you can also find Hainanese, Shanghai and Teochew mooncakes in Malaysia, which all look very different. And of course there are even more variations in China, with Beijing and Suzhou mooncakes being major ones.

The surprises, however, were far from over.

When I talked mooncakes with Alan a couple days later, he mentioned how much cheaper it is to make your own, but also how labour-intensive it is: cooking down adzuki (red) beans and lotus seeds, making salted eggs, prepping the dough, rolling it out thinly, wrapping the fillings, pressing the cakes into moulds, and baking them. 

I couldn't imagine myself going through all that hassle when mooncakes seemed so reasonably priced: Kam Ling's lotus paste mooncake with single yolk was 20 Malaysian ringgit (RM) - £3.53 - and its red bean mooncake with single yolk was only RM15 (£2.65).

Then a day later, I met another friend, Juan Carlos - who casually tossed into the conversation that he'd made his own mooncakes. My jaw may have dropped. Why would a Spanish astrophysicist, of all people, be making mooncakes? 

That's when I found out how expensive they can be - you could easily pay RM40–RM50 (£7–£8.82) for a premium mooncake, and as much as RM70–RM80 (£12.35–£14)! I couldn't believe how budget-friendly Kam Ling's mooncakes were by comparison. No wonder, as Jeff said, customers often buy 20 to 30 at a time.

But I still didn't get why Juan Carlos would undertake such a laborious task; not being local, no one would expect him to gift truckloads of mooncakes to friends and colleagues. His answer: Shopee! 

Shopee may be Southeast Asia's Amazon, but I had no idea they sell everything you need to make mooncakes (relatively) quickly, easily and cheaply, like mooncake moulds, pastry kits, ready-made fillings and vacuum-packed salted duck eggs. This might not quite be the artisanal process Alan described, but it certainly does the job.

Juan Carlos making mooncakes

Our friend Angel joined us for drinks later on - bringing a mooncake she, too, had made herself, at a baking workshop. At this point I began to think I was in an alternate universe where everyone made hand-pressed mooncakes and did six impossible things before breakfast. 

Angel's mooncake

When I got home and opened the fridge door, what did I find but - you guessed it - another mooncake. This one was courtesy of my friend Helen, who's staying with me for a while. Thankfully she hadn't made it herself (it really would be too much if a Greek physicist was going around making her own mooncakes too). 

We had a charming and entirely non-traditional tea party the next day, consisting of the mooncake and random bits of food. All in all, I'm pretty sure I've eaten more mooncake in the last four days than in my entire life!

Follow the white rabbit

One final Mid-Autumn discovery was the significance of white rabbits, which I learned about from my beautician, Joy, when I visited her last week. (Bearing Kam Ling mooncakes, I might add, which pleased her no end as she's always trying to teach me about local culture and customs.)

Joy loves to feed people; whenever I arrive at her home-based salon, there's a cup of tea and a lovely snack or three waiting for me. Last week's treat was even more delightful - the cutest little rabbit I've ever seen, with an even cuter carrot tucked behind its tail.

It was made of white jelly, with a red bean paste filling. The jelly had a delicate floral note, which Alan - the encyclopedia - thought came from osmanthus flowers or chrysanthemums, both of which are symbols of the Mid-Autumn Festival. 

So too is the white rabbit, which has many origin stories. In one version, the Moon Goddess Chang'e brought her pet rabbit with her when she ascended to the moon - where he became the Moon Rabbit, or the Jade Rabbit. In another version, Chang'e met the rabbit on the moon and they became close friends.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival and happy eating!

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