Mid-Autumn Festival is just around the corner and you know what that means—it’s that time of the year where you can excessively use the mooncake emoji in your texts without being judged! If you don’t already know, the mooncake emoji exists and there’s a bunch of different designs out there, unique across different platforms like Google, Apple, and Facebook among others.
Just like how there’s a variety of mooncake emoji designs, bakeries have also been busy crafting up unique types of mooncake since time immemorial. Apart from the traditional one that you see everywhere this time of year, there’s a whole lot of other styles out there too, which you might have come across at some point.
Here are a few popular variants and a couple of honourable mentions popping up across Malaysia and Singapore today:
1. Shanghai Mooncake
Let’s start with the more common variant with a familiar taste. The Shanghai mooncake is typically round-shaped and encased in a shortbread-like pastry shell. Almost resembling the Chinese heong peng pastry in both appeal and fragrance, the crust is similarly rich, buttery, and crumbly—with an extra slather of butter on the crust surface to give it a smooth texture and golden glisten. Check out these offers from Milky Way Food Industries and Barcook Bakery for a sweet-savoury fix of Shanghai mooncakes.
2. Jelly Mooncake
It’s exactly what it sounds like. Here, the mooncake filling wears a wobbly jelly ‘crust’, sometimes infused with pandan for a dash of sweet fragrance. Alternatively, the whole mooncake, including its filling, can be made of jelly. The appeal of jelly mooncake is its convenient potential to come in a variety of colours and fruity flavours. Introduce yourself to this delectable innovation with a homemade assortment from My Jelly Mooncake.
3. Ice Cream Mooncake
Ice cream mooncake takes the baton as a successor to the decades of hype for ice cream cake. Häagen-Dazs is one of the pioneers of this indulgent delight, which is basically creamy ice cream moulded to resemble a mooncake. With minimal to zero mooncake ingredients in here, this is the treat for you if you prefer playing out the tradition with a mouthful of creamy ice cream instead of the conventional lotus paste.
4. Snow Skin Mooncake
Sounds real fancy, right? Here’s a little background to this luxuriously named variant. It dates back to the mid-1900s when the more health-conscious folks felt that the traditional mooncake had its sugar and oil content a tad bit too high. Bakers in Hong Kong then created this variant as a more guilt-free alternative. While the traditional mooncake is usually filled with indulgent salted egg yolk and lotus seed or red bean paste, this one comes with delightfully lighter fillings such as fruit, sesame, coffee, and cheese.
If you’re up for a more refreshing bite, this mooncake also wears a non-baked glutinous rice crust and has to be kept chilled (like Japanese mochi ice cream), as opposed to the traditional counterpart with oven-baked crust.
TLDR: Fancier. Healthier. Raw-er. This is essentially the sashimi of mooncakes.
5. Spiral Mooncake
Also known as Teochew mooncake, this one presents a spin on the traditional mooncake design. The spiral mooncake is known for its flaky pastry crust and is usually made with yam filling. Take your palate for a spiralling twist through the delight with this offer from Wonderful Cake House.
6. Durian Mooncake
Has a delicacy truly reached Southeast Asians if no one has made a durian flavoured version of it yet? We’ll never know. What we do know is that durian mooncakes are emerging like crazy in Malaysia and Singapore. Bakers are now infusing creamy purée from the King of Fruits with mooncakes and we’re not complaining one bit.
7. Kek Lapis Mooncake
Yup, you read it right. There’s a kek lapis (layered cake) shop in Kuching that fuses the two traditional treats. Maria Kek Lapis flaunts a variety of filling designs with colourful layers, available in both baked and snow skin crusts. For all West Malaysians salivating in despair now, don’t worry—these kind folks do deliveries too!
And for the coup de grâce—
8. Bubble Tea Mooncake
Admit it, you saw this coming. Leave it to Singapore’s Changhosek to unite the contemporary and traditional Chinese delicacies. The bubble tea mooncake features lotus seed paste infused with premium tea, available in milk tea and matcha green tea flavours. Expect to encounter chewy pearls mid-bite as these folks don’t play around when it comes to bubble tea.
Get your mooncake journey started!
Seems like you’re all set to explore the vast, timeless world of mooncakes. Not sure where to start? Let us help you. Celebrate this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival with Fave on August 19 to September 15 for a myriad of marvellous mooncake deals from merchants including Milky Way Food Industries, Donutes Coffee and Cake Baking, Foh San Mooncake, Baiwago Plus Cafe, and many more!
P.S. While our current collection in Malaysia only houses mooncake deals from outlets around KL, Penang, Ipoh, and Johor, some of these merchants also provide delivery services for you breathtaking folks from out of town.
