Singapore Mooncakes

On this most recent visa-centered expedition, Singapore was Mooncake Central time. For the Chinese, the mooncake commemorates the mid-Autumn moon-slash-fertility festival and in Singapore you couldn’t turn around for the mooncake stalls. You can resist one mooncake, but mooncakes at every turn are hard to ignore, particularly when there’s a three-meter tall inflatable mooncake rotating on a stage in the middle of Bugis Village. I caved and bought three for a Singaporean dollar.

The general gist of mooncakes is that the best ones have egg yolks in them. This doesn’t mean they’re made with extra eggs for added richness or flavor, but that they have solid egg yolks in the middle which symbolize the moon. I don’t like egg surprises in my cakes, particularly of the salty duck variety, so I stick to the bog standard mooncake, which is lotus seed paste surrounded by a thin pastry casing.

The intended method of eating involves slicing the mooncake into little wedges and sharing it with loved ones and eating with Chinese tea. I can speak from personal experience that, should you not have any loved ones close by at the time, cramming a mooncake into your mouth on the way to the airport doesn’t seem to negatively affect its flavor. Extra trivia: many mooncakes are emblazoned with the Chinese symbol for fertility, so be wary of your mum trying to force feed them to you.