Mid-Autumn Festival - 中秋節

Tomorrow is the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month and is thus the Mid-Autumn Festival or 中秋節 (Zhongqiujie)。There are lots of legends and stories related to this festival - so if you are interested, just google for them! Mooncakes are traditionally Chinese pastries generally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. As for the fillings, it looks like the variety is endless - so I will not write more here!

Here to the home-made mooncakes!

 

The green one is the snow skin mooncake and the brown one is a baked mooncake. The filling inside the baked one is of lotus seed paste and melon seeds. These days, most of the fillings used are low sugar.

This is a small one - about 4 cm in diameter and the filling is a pineapple paste. Most, if not all, the commercial pineapple paste available now  are too sweet for me.

What is  Mid-Autumn Festival  without melon seed and, of course, the pamelo?

 Actually, my main interest in mooncakes is not in the actual moon cakes but in the moulds that produce the moon cakes!  Below is a  variety of the moulds - both wooden (previously hand-crafted, but now machined) and plastic - used for making mooncakes.

This is a wooden mould and is one of the four-in-one type, meaning that the four faces of the wooden block have four different patterns.

 

 

 

The following wooden moulds are stand alone units. 

The unicorn ..... 

The pig ....

The large square ....

The large oval and small round ....

These days , plastic moulds are also available and they are generally about 1/5 the price of the wooden ones though some of the better wooden ones fetch very much high prices. Plastic ones are easier to use BUT the quality of the relief in the patterns on the mooncakes is sharply reduced.

The large and small round moulds ....

 
The sow and five piglets ....  

 

In recent years, various manufacturers have also introduced the plastic moulds with springs for easy release of the mooncakes from the moulds ...

 

 

 

It is important to note that all the moulds seen here are for the home users. They are not used by the professional mooncake makers! Each of the professional mooncake makers will have their own set of hand-crafted wooden moulds with their own intricate unique patterns - costing thousands of ringgits, if not more. 

Here to a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!