From Vancouver Sun
At Soirette Macarons and Tea shop, it’s a multicultural Vancouver moment.
Moon cakes from Soirette on W. Pender street in Vancouver. (Vancouver Sun)
To four little kids, sitting down to a snack of macaron moon cakes, the notion of a macaron embedded inside a Chinese moon cake is nothing but normal in this culturally diverse city.
Soirette owner and pastry chef Shobna Kannusamy wasn’t trying to one-up the Cronut (croissant crossed with doughnut) or Ramen burger (deep-fried ramen standing in as the ‘buns’) when she came up with the idea. She just wanted to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (also known as the Moon Festival).
And so she created the prettiest moon cakes ever!
“The staff and I are so excited to do this from scratch and to learn new traditions in the name of dessert and pastry,” says Kannusamy, who is of Indian descent but grew up in Malaysia where she loved to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival with the Chinese community.
If you’re a longtime Vancouverite and still don’t know about the Mid-Autumn Festival, it’s time! It’s not as big a deal as Chinese New Year, but in the Chinese community, as well as Vietnamese and Korean communities, it’s big.
“We consider this a huge celebration,” says Stephanie Yuen, a food writer and cookbook author. “It’s on a full moon during the harvest. This year, it’s on September 8 and people will go out to gardens, parks and rooftops and enjoy snacks. Kids will play with lanterns, adults will chat and talk about life. It’s a celebration for having a good crop and the bright round moon is a symbol for everyone being together.”
The Moon Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month on the Chinese calendar.
When Yuen was growing up in Hong Kong, the legends her parents passed on sealed her fascination with the moon and its celebration.
“There’s a lot of folklore. The Chinese believe there is a moon goddess on the moon. She was a queen who escaped from a mean emperor who was going to take a pill that would give him immortality. She believed his people would suffer so she stole the pill and flew off to the moon. They believe one of the shadows on the moon is her,” says Yuen.
“There’s also this guy, he was a high-ranking military officer who made some mistakes. He was punished and sent to the moon. And a third shadow is that of a jade rabbit which is there to accompany the goddess.”
So on September 8. Look up. Way up. And see if you can catch sight of the goddess and the officer and the rabbit.
But down here on earth, the most salient symbol of Mid-Autumn Festival is the round (full-moon shaped) moon cake which are pastries with sweet filling, often with a moulded design on top. You have but to walk into the T & T Chinese supermarket over the next week to behold the importance of moon cakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Traditionally, moon cakes have lotus seed or red bean paste filling with an egg yolk in the centre but these days, imagination reigns. You’ll find chocolate and pine nut, tiramisu, pine nut longjin tea, date and walnut, pumpkin, custard, green tea and red bean, mango, taro, mochi, and pineapple flavours at T & T.
Read the full article HERE.
