Monday, September 15, 2008
Posted by Miss Neddy at 10:58 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related

Last night was the Chinese Midautumn Festival (although some places, such as Hong Kong, are celebrating it today). It is said that the moon on the fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month is its fullest and most beautiful. And just as the moon reaches completion, so does the family. As a rule, all family members must come home to have dinner during the Midautumn Festival, and the children will play with lanterns, while adults may guess riddles that are written on paper lanterns, or stripes of paper hung from the lanterns.

Mooncakes are another traditional item associated with Midautumn. Generally made with lotus paste as the filling - although there are many varieties nowadays to tickle the consumer’s fancy, such as ice-cream, durian or even bird’s nest and pearl powder - the mooncake is quite sweet, almost sickeningly so. Some mooncakes may have 1 to 4 (or even up to 9 for the larger mooncakes!) salted duck egg yolks inside, that adds richness to the already rich lotus paste, but also helps mitigate the sweetness.

Tea leaves are commonly packaged with mooncakes as gifts, as tea is the beverage to go with mooncakes. The cleansing lightness of tea helps remove the over-satitated feeling that eating mooncakes can bring, and helps bring out the fragrance of the lotus paste. It is a wonderful family gathering where the children run about with their lanterns, while the adults sit back, gaze at the moon, and sip tea in between tiny slivers of sweet mooncake.

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