Mooncakes!

Hello from Hong Kong! We have officially moved out of Tokyo, and have been in HK for a few days now. We've been busy doing uninteresting - but necessary - stuff to set up a new life here, The Four Seasons in Central is our temporary home for the next few weeks, and I'm thankful that I don't have to do household cleaning chores on top of everything.

Our arrival in HK coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival (aka Moon Festival), which meant mooncakes were everywhere! Unfortunately this year's celebrations were dampened somewhat by the typhoon weather, and it was practically impossible to view the full-moon, but the crappy weather didn't stop anyone from eating mooncakes. I love this stuff, and although all kinds of traditional and contemporary fillings and crusts are available these days, I am very partial to the plain old-fashioned lotus seed paste. On Tuesday, we'd returned to our room to find that the Four Seasons management had given us complimentary mini-mooncakes, and we happily devoured them. They were both really yummy, and my only regret was that there weren't more of them.

The mini-mooncakes packaged individually in tin boxes; with egg custard filling and mixed five kernel filling:

Egg custard mooncake:

Obviously, multi-national food brand names would adapt their products and marketing to the different cultures of each country, so it really shouldn't have been that surprising to see the following advertising signs outside Haagen-Dazs and Godiva in the IFC Mall, yet I couldn't resist whipping out my camera like a tourist and taking photos.

Anyway, the mooncake festival is more or less completed now, which hopefully means that unsold mooncakes will be marked down for the cheap and greedy like me!