Full moon…

The Mid-Autumn or Mooncake Festival (中秋节 ) falls on Monday, 8th September this year, the 15th Day of the 8th Month in the Chinese Lunar calendar.

As in previous years, I have bought our local Foochow pek quek ting chiew pia (8th Month Festival biscuits) to enjoy and at the same time, commemorate this auspicious occasion in the year to uphold the age-old tradition…and as always, I would steer clear of those lovely mooncakes from the peninsula as they are mighty expensive and the very nice ones made locally aren’t all that cheap either and what’s worse would be the fact that the prices would keep going up every year.

I was still stalling for time, torn between buying or not buying, when I chanced upon these…

…made in Lahad Datu in Sabah…

…at a café here the previous weekend when we dropped by for lunch. I saw the big price tag beside the displays and it  was only RM7.75 but when I asked, the girl told me that it was only for the green bean flavour and I am not too fond of that. Still at RM9.75 for lotus paste and RM10.75 for single yolk, I thought they were cheaper than the rest so I bought one each to try.

They turned out to be really good…

– the lotus filling was fine and smooth and not sweet, just slightly and I really liked that a lot. Most of the mooncakes are simply too sweet for my liking even though they claim to be “low sugar” or “reduced sugar” and I really wonder why these would be even more expensive when in fact, they would be using less of one ingredient.

The skin may be a bit thicker than some…

…but I am o.k. with that as I do enjoy eating the pastry, not just the paste in the mooncake.

They had around 8 different flavours on the counter, one mooncake of each and I am not sure whether those were the samples and they had more put away some place. I certainly hope they have more as I would be making my way there again one of these days to grab more for myself and to give away before the festival comes around.

In the meantime, my daughter’s friend/coursemate from Bintangor contacted her and passed her these homemade ones…

I’ve seen some people calling these “Shanghai mooncakes” and I do enjoy these as well.

The ones we got were really good, much nicer than those from the local bakeries here or here as far as the pastry was concerned. The pink ones had red bean paste inside…

…while the green ones were pandan-flavoured…

I thought both flavours were nice – a bit sweeter than the made-in-Lahad-Datu ones that I bought but not too sweet, thankfully. I did think, however, that I would very much prefer the original colour of the pastry and they could have just dotted the mooncakes with a pink or green dot on top instead of colouring them completely like that. Ah well, beggars can’t be choosers and as they say, the best things in life are free…and we should never look at a gift horse in its mouth.

It certainly was so sweet and thoughtful of you, Christina, to get us some to try – thank you so very much. It is indeed very much appreciated.