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Moon cakes from the Pan Pacific Vancouver Hotel include a Canadian version made with ice wine, maple syrup, hazelnuts and sun-dried cranberries.LAURA LEYSHON
Moon cakes are to the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival what fruitcake is to Christmas – with one glaring exception: They’re wildly popular.
Traditional moon cakes are thick, round pastries baked in a thin glazed crust, filled with dense, sweet lotus-seed paste and typically containing a whole salted duck-egg yolk, mixed nuts or shredded ham. Presented as gifts during the Chinese holiday that honours longevity and family unity on the day the moon is brightest, which this year falls on Oct. 4, they’re as heavy as hockey pucks, loaded with lard and so rich you can only eat a small wedge in one sitting – preferably washed down with a cup of strong black tea.
If that sounds about as appetizing as grandma’s mince-meat pie, how about a modern moon cake stuffed with champagne custard, chocolate ganache or Canadian ice wine?
In the quest to please novelty-seeking taste buds, pastry stores, supermarkets and hotel restaurants from Shanghai to Taipei are revitalizing the 700-year-old delicacy with fancy (sometimes healthier) versions, often encased in chilled jelly or glutinous rice “snow skin” shells.
And now the new moon cake phenomenon is rising in Canada.
“I was at T & T the other day and they were selling frozen ice-cream moon cakes, if you can believe it,” says Daryle Nagata, executive chef at the Pan Pacific Vancouver Hotel, which makes its own Canadian moon cakes with ice wine, maple syrup, hazelnuts and sun-dried cranberries.
In the last decade or so, the market for luxury moon cakes has become so heated that the Shangri-la Hotel in Beijing has a moon cake hotline. Certain box sets (such as those sold by the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, which launched its first snowy champagne moon cake in 1994) have turned into sought-after collector’s items. The most famous bakeries in Hong Kong issue certificates, similar to wine futures, that sell out months in advance. Even Haagen-Dazs and Starbucks have jumped into the fray with their green-tea flavoured and chocolate-crusted hot cakes, respectively.
In Toronto, the Metropolitan Hotel’s Lai Wah Heen restaurant introduced its first modern moon cake this year. Senior corporate chef Patrick Lin says that although the hotel’s traditional lotus-seed cake sold better through pre-orders, the new deep-fried puff-pastry moon cake with mango, durian and lychee fillings – to his surprise – was by far the much more popular item at the restaurant’s tasting table.
“People want something interesting, crispy and lighter in the mouth,” says Mr. Lin, who remembers working in Hong Kong in the 1980s, when the Tai Pan Bread & Cakes bakery chain created the first snowy moon cake with a creamy mochi-like rice skin. “I think the market in Toronto is getting more mature. They’re really catching up with what’s going on outside of Canada.”
Three years ago, Mr. Nagata went sent to China on behalf of the federal government to represent Canadian food exports. He’ll never forget being stationed at Guangzhou’s White Swan Hotel during the height of the moon-cake sporting season.
“The Chinese take their moon cakes very seriously,” he says. “There were all these people in Mercedes-Benzes pulling up to scalpers behind the hotel who were selling moon cakes from the back of their trucks. It was like trying to get Canucks’ tickets during the playoffs.”
According to legend, moon cakes were instrumental in overthrowing China’s Mongolian rulers at the end of the Yuan dynasty in the late 1300s. During the lunar festival, Hans rebels drove out the invaders by distributing moon cakes (which the Mongols didn’t eat) with a secret call-to-arms message hidden in the centre. The salty egg yolk symbolizes the full moon on the day of the attack.
After the Canadian embassy in Beijing sent Mr. Nagata’s delegation a box of moon cakes made with Canadian ingredients, which soon became a hot collectors’ item, he vowed that he would one day make Canadian moon cakes. “Because I knew no one else was doing it,” he says.
Launched last year, Mr. Nagata’s West Coast moon cakes, only available at the hotel’s weekday buffet and Sunday brunch, uses an old-fashioned wood mould for shaping, and classic golden crust.
“I could give you the recipe, but, uh, good luck,” he says with a laugh, noting that it took him four months to perfect the dough recipe with the help of local chefs in Richmond, B.C., and a cooking school in Beijing.
Lee Man, a Vancouver food writer who specializes in Chinese cuisine, doffs his hat to Mr. Nagata for the density of his cakes and not-so-sweet filling. “It’s very authentic, yet new,” he said after a recent taste testing.
He was less enamoured with the newfangled Taiwanese “gummy bear” versions from T & T supermarkets, filled with strawberry yogurt, pistachio red bean and sesame pine-seed paste.
“They’re kid-friendly, I suppose. Maybe I’m an anachronism, but I really prefer traditional moon cakes with good ingredients and a handmade quality,” he says, pointing to the sandy texture of the egg yolks in the red-bean moon cakes from Kirin Restaurants, which bead up with tiny droplets of oil.
Back in Toronto, Mr. Lin is of two minds. “Yes, we have to remember the home culture and educate the next generation,” he says, likening modern moon cakes to the pairing of Chinese food with Western wines.
“But even my own daughters hate all that history. Traditions need to be modified to broaden the appeal.”
Follow Alexandra Gill on Twitter: @lexxgillOpens in a new window
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