On the Menu | With Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake flavours getting more outrageous, isn’t it time we went back to basics?

Traditional mooncakes, proper ones, take a lot of crafting, so please stop calling any round puck, such as one filled with beef Wellington or caviar, a mooncake

Yes, there may be lots of calories in a classic lotus seed paste and salted egg yolk mooncake, but is that reason enough to treat it with disdain?

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The Mooncake Wellington, from Hong Kong bakery Phoebe’s Kitchen, is one of the more out-there mooncake flavours of recent years. Delicious as they may be, can iterations like this even be called mooncakes? Photo: Phoebe’s Kitchen

Published: 7:45am, 21 Sep 2023

Every year I feel compelled to defend the mooncake’s honour. The hate towards this traditional Mid-Autumn sweet tends to come around annually, often to the tune of:

“They’re too sweet!” “Who eats them anyway?” “Don’t you know how many calories are in a slice?” “I just don’t get the point of them.”

Some of these naysayers give the modern custard mooncake – defined by a thin, crumbly, cookie crust and a creamy, eggy centre – a free pass, though, citing it as an example of pastry evolution – an improved specimen far superior to the old-fashioned, stodgy lotus seed mooncakes.

One of the most famous examples of the new guard is luxury hotel The Peninsula Hong Kong’s Spring Moon custard mooncake, co-created in 1986 by chef Yip Wing-wah – it’s described as “blending Eastern traditions with Western culinary skills” – and remains the gold standard for the genre.

The Peninsula’s Spring Moon mini egg custard mooncakes have been a Mid-Autumn Festival hit in Hong Kong since they were created in 1986. Photo: The Peninsula

Back when it was created, the custard mooncake was seen as novel and exciting when every other traditional mooncake purveyor was fighting for the title of the best.