blog post #2 revised

The moon in the plate

October 3rd, 2009. This was not an unusual day to most people in the world, but it was important to 1.3 billion Chinese. It was Mid-Autumn Festival.

Mid-Autumn Festival, which means the middle of the autumn, is on August 15th of Chinese lunar calendar. It is a traditional Chinese festival that has a strong relationship with moon. The festival is also called Moon Festival. A legend about the origin of this festival explained why Mid-Autumn is correlated to moon.

It is said that thousands of years ago, there were ten suns in the sky. All people suffered from intense heat everyday. A man named Hou Yi was good at toxophily. He shot arrows to the sky and killed nine suns. Undoubtedly he became the hero of the country. As his reward, the Heavenly Queen Mother gave Hou Yi the Elixir of Immortality, but she warned him that he must use it wisely. At the same time, many youths visited him and took him as their toxophily coach. On August 15th, Peng Meng, one of the youths, tried to steal the Elixir. Hou’s wife, Chang E, found out his polt. She knew that she could not fight against Peng. Thus she ate the Elixir and flied to moon. From then on, people kowtowed to moon to memorize Chang E every year.

On Mid-Autumn Festival, moon will be round and bright. People always appreciate moon and ate moon cakes together. The moon cake looks like moon because of its color and round shape, which and symbolizes reunion. People believe that eating moon cakes can strengthen the relationship between family members and bring the whole family luck.

The most ordinary moon cake is Cantonese moon cake, which you can find in Atlanta. Cantonese moon cakes are always sweet and soft. The wrappers are thin and have gorgeous traditional Chinese patterns, such as dragon, carved on them. The stuff of them can be lotus-nut paste, red bean paste, coconut paste and so on. Sometimes you can find a salted yolk in the Cantonese moon cake. Since Mid-Autumn is coming, I bought a lot of moon cakes from Dinghao Supermarket in China Town. I tried one lotus-nut paste flavor moon cake, one red bean paste flavor moon cake, and one date paste flavor moon cake. I never thought that I could find such appetizing and tasty moon cakes in America. They were almost the same as the moon cakes I bought in China.

Having bitted the lotus-nut paste moon cake, I felt my mouth was full of sweet thick liquid. The stuff melted immediately and began to stimulate my taste bud. It was sticky, but still smooth. The taste of it was similar to the taste of toffee but not absolutely the same because toffee contains a lot of milk and cream but lotus-nut paste moon cake doesn’t. What’s more, the moon cake has a delicate fragrance of lotus which made me feel really relaxed and satisfied. When I was chewing, I looked at the rest of the moon cake in my left hand. The lotus-nut paste inside the moon cake was brown and translucent which looked like glossy and sparkling amber. I finished the first moon cake in only three minutes because every time I swallowed the moon cake in my mouth, I couldn’t wait to eat more.

Before I tried the second moon cake, I gargled first to make my mouth sensitive enough to taste. Unlike the lotus-nut paste, the red bead paste didn’t melt in my mouth when I ate it. This kind of stuff was more solid than the pervious one. Though it was soft, you could still obviously feel that some small particles were moving through your teeth when chewing. It also emitted a light smell of rose and osmanthus. The color of red bean paste was like milk chocolate and the texture of it was like the mixture of sand and mud. In China, red bean symbolizes sweet love because of the red color and the sweet taste of it. Food with red bean paste stuffed can always make me comfortable and warm.

The last one was the date paste flavor moon cake. The date paste tasted a little bit sour and bitter. The texture of it was both sticky and solid, just like the combination of lotus-nut paste and red bean paste. The color of it is similar to the color of red bean paste, but brighter and redder. In addition, some pine nuts were added into the date paste. I really loved to chew the crisp and soft pine nuts when eating date paste the moon cake. Someone might not like the sour flavor of date, but to me, it is a kind of taste from the nature which is pure and fresh.

In China, moon cakes have many different types and different flavors. Many areas have their own kinds of moon cakes. Beijing has the Jing moon cake stuffed with nut paste. Yunnan has Dian moon cake with ham inside. These kinds of moon cakes are always special and distinctive. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried them yet. Maybe I can tell you the taste of it next time.

My favorite moon cake is the Su moon cake. This kind of moon cake can be both sweet and salty. The stuff of it can be pork, sea sedge and sesame paste. Su moon cakes’ wrappers are crisp and thick, so that patterns can not be carved on Su moon cakes. Some Su moon cakes will have characters drawn on with red edible pigment to show the flavor of it.

Most of the moon cakes need to be baked and can be stored in room temperature. But the ice-wrapper moon cake is an exception. Ice-wrapper moon cakes look like colorful transparent Cantonese moon cakes and have to be stored in refrigerator. The way to cook them is same as that of western deserts. In fact, the ice-wrapper moon cake is a kind western food with Chinese aspect. Nowadays, the most famous ice-wrapper moon cake is Starbucks moon cakes. Though Starbucks has an extremely short history of making moon cakes, it has developed several flavors of moon cake, such as coffee, vanilla, cheese, green tea, and cranberry.

Today, the most fashionable moon cake should be ice-cream moon cake. It was first invented by the ice-cream company Häagen-Dazs in China. Now you can also find ice-cream moon cakes in Dairy Queen and some other ice-cream shops. It is actually ice-cream with chocolate shell in moon-cake shape. Obviously, the flavor of these moon cakes are depended on the flavors of the ice-cream stuffed. The wrapper can be white chocolate, milk chocolate or black chocolate. Though the weather is cool in mid-autumn, the ice-cream moon cakes are still popular because of the delicious taste.

This is my first Mid-Autumn Festival in America. That day, Atlanta was clear and cloudless. The moon was round and pure, shining brightly. I degusted the moon cake, enjoyed the sight of moon alone. I talked with my parents by MSN. Though we could not discuss the moon because of time difference, I still felt warm and contented. It seems that I have never left them. I realized wherever my parents and I were, our hearts would always connected with each other.

In my eyes is the moon in the sky
In my hand is the moon in the plate.