Mooncake Festival

Last saturday, we joined the Association Francaise de Singapour for an outing to celebrate the Chinese mooncake festival. Although the festival runs for 3 weeks, most celebrations occured last weekend as a result of the moon appearing it's largest in the sky for the year. By the way, mooncakes in french are called 'gateau de lune'. Everywhere in Singapore you can buy and try mooncakes at the moment. All the hotels chefs sell their variation of mooncakes made by their chefs- from the traditional - lotus, egg, red bean to exotic - chocolate, passionfruit, nuts etc.

Their history goes something along the lines that they were used by revolutionaries to hide notes inside the cakes to amass the people against the Mongolian rulers of China at the time. It worked, and they overthrew the Monguls. Nowdays however, there are no notes inside the mooncakes.

Anyway, getting back to our tour. We met with the group at the Chinese gardens and had a brief history of the most famous chinese figures (whose statues appear in the gardens). The gardens were so pretty - decorated with lanterns. We were also able to taste 4 different mooncakes - Lotus, red bean, nut, and passionfruit. Can't say we love them; I think it's the texture that we didn't like. They are quite pastey and heavy. We liked the flavour of the lotus, nut and the passionfruit mooncakes- but the traditional red bean was a taste to be acquired.....

Z tried them all - and was a great little helper, serving the mooncakes for tasting.

Now, I have to tell you to score brownie points - the entire event was in french!