This year’s Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival lies on Monday, September 24 according to the Lunar Calendar. It will always be the 15th day of the 8th month of the Lunar Calendar, a night where the moon is at its roundest and fullest ?. People usually go out to “catch” the moon, play lanterns and of course, eat moon cakes to celebrate this festival. Having mooncakes during this festival is as important as eating turkeys on Thanksgiving Day for the western cultures.
This year we came across a special type of mooncakes from Vietnam which you will see us try in the above video ? (Sorry, in Canto only).
Egg Yolk represents the Moon!
There are many kind of mooncakes in the market nowadays. In the video, we tried something called “5-nuts” moon cakes. The main ingredients included 5 kinds of nuts and an egg yolk. The egg yolk simply represents the beauty of a full moon. The 5 nuts are different from region to region, usually they are wintermelon seeds, sesame seeds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, peanuts, or almonds. What made us excited this time is that they added Chinese hams and Chinese red gingers as some of the ingredients.
Surprisingly, it tasted very very good. It wasn’t too sweet and greasy. The texture was relatively tougher than traditional mooncakes. I know a lot of people do not like the texture of the mooncakes made from lotus seeds. If you are one of them, you should definitely try this Vietnamese version. The texture is completely different. I do like both of them.
Caloric Nightmare
Mooncake is a caloric nightmare! One small mooncake could contain around 1000 Calories ?. Fat and sugar contents are incredibly high. A family usually share one small mooncake and drink tea such as flower tea, green tea or red tea (Oolong) with it. The acetic acid in tea can help with digestion and prevent fat accumulation! ?
