Tuesday 15 September 2009

Tastebuds Tantalized or Traumatized?

As the annual Mid-Autumn Festival fast approaches, Hongkongers are bombarded with plenty of mooncake offerings. Here's one spotted earlier in one of the supermarket chains:



Chinese ham with mixed nuts mooncake. So that means: soft, rubbery, salty, savoury ham, with hard, crunchy, stick-in-your-teeth mixed nuts, enveloped with sweet, sticky, powdery stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth lotus seed paste. A classic Chinese recipe or a new-fangled Far East concoction?

Has anyone else spotted any "interesting" mookcake flavour combinations?

The cost and packaging of mooncakes is also very interesting. Retailers always try to sell mooncakes with the lucky number 8 in the price, but bizarrely also always sell mooncakes in unlucky boxes of 4. Why is this? With the above-mentioned ham-nuts mooncake item, a box of 4 mooncakes sell for a seemingly lucky $178, which works out to be an apparently unlucky $44.50 per mooncake.

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