I love the Mid Autumn Festival in Singapore because I love mooncakes. This year, the Mooncake Festival is on September 22 but mooncakes have been on sale since late August.
I am always lucky enough to be in town at the right time. Singapore has the traditional baked mooncake but a few years back, they introduced the heavenly snowskin mooncake.
Made of glutinous rice flour that is molded around the filling, snowskin mooncakes are chilled and not baked. Baked mooncake fillings are the usual red bean or white lotus paste with eggs and nuts. But snowskin mooncakes are filled with all sorts of decadently delicious stuff -- how about durian, mango, Bailey's, cappucino, Irish whiskey, passion fruit, dark chocolate, hazelnut -- you name your particular fancy and chances are, you'll find it inside the snowskin mooncake.
Bakeshops, hotels, restaurants in Singapore have both varieties available -- baked mooncakes for the traditionalists and snowskin mooncakes for those who want something different.
The basement hall of Takashimaya in Orchard Road was running its annual Mooncake Festival Sale this week-end. I walked through row upon row of stalls selling both mooncake versions. You could easily tell which stalls had the durian variety!
However, my personal favorite is the snowskin mooncake from the Raffles Hotel. It's not just the really pretty tin it comes in -- I can't resist the out of this world flavor varieties that they have.
The best seller is the Snowskin Mooncake with Champagne Truffle and Ganache. This year, they also featured the Hazel Choco mooncake, Cognac Truffle, Dark Chocolate Crunchy Pearl, Apricot with Popping Candy and the Tiger Lily Mooncake.
I always get a combination of flavors in a tin -- it comes out a bit more expensive but I get to try all the flavors. A tin of 8 of the same flavor is S$50 -- not much to pay for a taste trip to the moon and back!
Happy Mid Autumn Festival to all!
No comments:
Post a Comment