I should have people over for lunch every day. Well, perhaps every week. I just had a super lunch party. Friends came from all over, Honk Kong, New York, Putney, Fitzrovia, Hampstead, Dalston and Sussex and each came with one or more wonderful present: chocolates from l’Artisan du Chocolat, spicy peanuts from Beijing (the best ever), a special red rice from Dimen village (will write about it and Joanna, Ken and uncle Kit in a separate post), beautiful jars of fried garlic, lovely wine, and the most amazing mooncakes from Honk Kong.
As you know, Jenny and I were in Honk Kong recently and as we waited for our ferry to go to Cheung Chau island, we spotted a bakery in the ferry building where we bought all kinds of Chinese pastries. They were all awful. Not so much because none were really sweet — the Chinese don’t like their sweets sweet — but because the place was a kind of fast food bakery and the quality was very poor. I don’t remember if we bought mooncakes but if we had, they were nothing like the Wing Wah mooncakes Wendy, my lovely friend who lives there, brought with her. Not only were they amazing to eat but they were also packed in the most gorgeous tin. Even the plastic wrapper that each mooncake was wrapped in was gorgeous.
I immediately joked with Wendy saying I would revert to how I was as a child and not share. Which is what happened, but only because of the bounty everyone else had brought. And I have been eating them ever since By the time I read that each clocked up to 1200 calories, it was too late. Still, I have saved one for Jenny but if she doesn’t come soon to share it, it’ll be bye bye mooncake for her. I have to say, they are really extraordinary; and what is even better, is that they are my Easter replacement for our cookies, ma’mul (my first blog post!). The principle is the same, a very thin pastry shell encasing a filling, pressed into a mould, then baked.
But this is where the resemblance stops. The mooncake pastry shell is very thin and very soft. In ma’mul, the pastry is crumbly. The filling is lotus seed paste and salted duck egg yolks instead of nuts or dates! And where our cookies are sweet and fragrant, these are a combination of slightly sweet (the paste) with slightly salty (the yolks), which makes for very intriguing eating whenever you get some of the yolk in the same bite as the paste.
Heavy but really good. And now that I have only one left, I need to check if Wing Wah export these culinary treasures to England. Mind you, it may be safer if they don’t otherwise I may have to survive on just mooncakes given that they take up almost all of my daily calorie allowance!
