The 1 Mooncake You Need to Try in Hong Kong

Few Cantonese foods are more beautiful than the mooncakes of Mid-Autumn Festival, which occurs on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month. Mooncakes are round and sort of resemble the full moon on the outside. On the inside, they’re stuffed with egg yolks, which are also round like the moon. There’s a lot of talk of wholeness and family reunions during this time. It’s a harvest festival like Thanksgiving, and you eat mooncakes to become whole — or something like that.

I grew up in the '90s, a time when mooncakes in Hong Kong were gorgeous, but tasted pretty standard, consisting of a thick pastry crust decorated with designs that reference Chang’e, the goddess of the moon and her rabbit, or characters meaning “harmony,” and stuffed with lotus seed or red bean paste and an egg yolk or two. The more yolks, the more expensive the mooncake.

They’re not something you’d make at home, the way you’d gather all the kids together and make them fold a thousand wontons during Lunar New Year. I would maybe take a symbolic bite of mooncake, wanting no more than the smallest part in its dense, sticky sweet wholeness, and abandon the rest to run around the neighborhood showing off my super cool lantern. Mid-Autumn Festival to me was like Halloween for my American cousins who wielded orange plastic pumpkins in the same way, except they got much better sweets, and their jack-o-lanterns were filled with candy. Mine just had a candle in it. And we just got lousy mooncakes.

I never liked those mooncakes. They’re dense. If tossed, they have the same effect as a hockey puck lobbed at your skull. I can’t recall anyone really liking them or wanting them. They were constantly regifted. They remind me of the Christmas fruitcakes that are passed on, from family to family, until they reach their final iteration of becoming a doorstop. 

But mooncakes have evolved. Hong Kong has gone completely mooncake berserk since I was a kid. Some of them are legitimately good! Instead of doughy pastry crusts, we have delightfully crumbly, gossamer thin crusts encasing creamy egg custard fillings. We also went through a period of non-mooncake mooncakes, like beef Wellington mooncakes (which are just small beef Wellingtons), and mooncakes filled with caviar and truffles. 

Every luxury hotel and design house these days issues a mooncake box. Some of them are strange. Hopelessly hip houseware brand G.O.D. (Goods of Desire) partnered with arguably Hong Kong’s biggest and most famous bakery, Maxim’s, to produce an enormously popular line of mooncakes shaped like bums. The trend of designer mooncakes has sparked heated debates over Hong Kong’s negligent consumerism during Mid-Autumn Festival. The South China Morning Post now regularly publishes op-eds pleading for a return to simpler mooncake times, for companies to exercise restraint when it comes to excess packaging, as well as lists of charities to which one should donate their excess mooncakes. 

So if you’re going to consume a mooncake, might I suggest the Lava Cream Egg Custard from Duddell’s? Don’t be fooled by the name, this is not a British pub, this is a Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant of the highest caliber. Every year, they partner with an artist to produce a mooncake hamper so beautiful you’d better keep it forever. Every year, the mooncakes taste the same, whether they’re encased in an LED lantern box or a spaceship (because spaceships take you to the moon, get it?). 

The egg yolks are steamed with rose wine for mooncake filling, encased in golden, buttery pastry and pressed by hand into wooden molds, creating a light but rich pastry with a yolky center. This is a mooncake ridiculously luxurious and decadent, without the use of any absurd ingredients. And yet, it is austere in construction and traditional in appearance. It is agony not having one in my hands at this moment. This mooncake alone is worth the trip to Hong Kong.