The Mid Autumn Festival this year has yielded a lot of interesting new mooncake experiments in addition to the already significant variants of more "traditional" mooncakes. I just found out that the differing regions of each Chinese province produces a slightly (or significantly different) version of "their" mooncake.
It seems that every concoction, even the ones we get throughout the year are being called "mooncakes" to target this significant Chinese celebration. It's not actually incorrect, as I've been told...these things are actually mooncakes eaten during the Mid Autumn Festival in their respective provinces in mainland China.
There are several variants that's being produced throughout the year by local mooncake manufacturers though, coz they're actually biscuits and the consumer market seems to have a demand for these products throughout the year.
Kuching has a mooncake to call its own, called the la ko mooncake. It comes in black and beige colors and it's sprinkled with sesame seeds and something that looks remarkably like maggots dipped in pink food coloring.
The best implementation of la ko is arguably the ones made by Biscuit Factory, Kuching.
This la ko has sesame seeds on top as well as kuaci seeds and the abovementioned quasi-maggots.
It also contains lotus paste inside. It tastes remarkably like nien kau, the sweet confection that's eaten during Chinese New Year. It's good, and most importantly, it's a mooncake to call our own. :)
The Nyonya Sambal Mooncake is another new mooncake filling that came out this year. It retails for RM 11.50 each or RM 23 for a elongated tin box of two which comes with a cutter.
The stroke of midnight yesterday marks the Mid Autumn Festival and I went out with a group of my friends to enjoy the sambal filled mooncake at a pub.
I also bought a cheese filled mooncake made by the same manufacturer - this time the cheese mooncake comes in the conventional "wrap" instead of a jelly wrap.
This is the Cheese Mooncake - the mooncake tastes sweet and the cheese filling complements the mooncake well. It's definitely a mooncake that bodes well to repeated consumption.
This is the Nyonya Sambal Mooncake...there is a visible core of sambal paste and the sambal is spicy. This may seem like a weird combination, but I prefer the word unique. ;) The sambal mooncake tastes surprisingly good as well - the spicy sambal is offset by the semi-sweet mooncake covering. It's tasty, the manufacturer manages to fuse unusual fillings into edible mooncakes.
Have a great Mid Autumn Festival everyone!
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