Moon cake renewed
Mei Fang wraps moon cake dough around a ball of green-tea filling in the kitchen of Sing Cheong Yuan bakery. The dough is pressed into a wooden mold, below, and emerges marked with a traditional design.
Sing Cheong Yuan Bakery in Chinatown is updating the traditional moon cake with new fillings, just in time for next week’s Moon Festival.
Sing Cheong Yuan’s variety of moon cake includes -- on the left tray from front -- five-nut, lotus seed, black bean and coconut. The back three all have a duck egg yolk tucked in. On the right tray are mochi moon cakes with fillings of black bean, front, yellow bean with duck egg and sesame seed.
Besides New Year’s, nothing says "tradition" to the Chinese community like the Moon Festival, a celebration of thanksgiving, which this year falls next Wednesday.
On this day, friends and family pay visits to one another with gifts of moon cakes, pastries filled with the likes of black sugar, lotus seed and coconut, with an egg yolk often added for good measure. The cakes signify health, long life, togetherness and happiness.
At Sing Cheong Yuan Bakery in Chinatown, where they make almond cookies, peanut candy, gau, Chinese tea cakes and wedding cakes, the moon cakes are made from scratch, a rarity in the islands. (Most moon cakes are imported from San Francisco and China.) The popular bakery is gearing up for the demand with the help of 10 extra bakers.
"We have 10 types of moon cake, and last year we sold about 10,000. It’s hard to say exactly how much — we were so busy making them," says Wesley Fang, who owns the shop with his wife, Mei.
This year, Sing Cheong Yuan is launching something new: moon cakes filled with fresh fruit. These particular cakes are not encased in the baked wheat pastry; they’re a mochi moon cake called "bing pi."
"We’ll be using strawberry and mango, only for the festival, one week prior because they must be refrigerated," says Fang. "We’re using local mango in a custard filling, and we also might use lychee.
Don't miss out on what's happening!
Stay in touch with top news, as it happens, conveniently in your email inbox. It's FREE!
"Whenever we can, we use local ingredients."
Though some may lament the step away from tradition, the Fangs say they’re actually trying to preserve tradition.
"We’re blending old with new to try to get the younger generation to accept tradition" and continue it, says Mei Fang. "It’s like flavored coffee — we have newer fillings."
