When my aunt came over to visit from Hong Kong, she brought over one of the most delicious and authentically Chinese delicacies ever: the 月並, a.k.a. the mooncake.This mooncake is no ordinary fare.
It's not some muddled sugar and flour concoction you can find at any old 99 Ranch Market. No, no, no, this mooncake is Hong Kong's finest. Boxes selling for more than the price of your head. And boxes of them are currently chilling out in my grandma's freezer. So that's like... a bunch of heads hanging out in the freezer, hmm... not an appealing thought.
There were two different types of mooncake. One was the original, with the buttery egg yolk in the center of a sugary brown armor. The other is gourmet: mooncake made out of bird's nest. It has to be chilled like it's an ice cream mooncake.
My sister has already devoured enough of them that her waistline is crying for her to stop but I have managed to miss every previous mooncake tasting event.
And yes, it is quite an event.
Let me tell you what goes down. Basically, all the parties interested in tasting the mooncakes gather around our round dining room table. The mooncakes are placed on china plates and then cut into slivers of ten.
Because I am currently watching my weight, I am on heavy-duty fatty-foodie-watch by my policewoman of a mother. Her general assumption is that I will wolf down anything delectable regardless of the time, place, my hunger level, etc. When I'm sitting at the dinner table, she'd hide behind the counter by the fridge and sneakily drink her green bean soup, for fear that I would pounce on it or something. It's working though. I am 10 pounds down and counting.
So back to the mooncake. Of course my mother was not too happy that I would be placing in my body these little bites of heaven that roughly amount to 100 calories each. (I'm going to remind you that we had already cut them into pieces of 10, so...you do the math for a whole mooncake.)
For the past couple of days, she had been like, "NO NO NO" anytime the remote possibility of me trying a piece of mooncake comes up. But after much persuasion by my aunt, she had finally relented to me trying a piece of the bird's nest one.
I ate that lone piece while my svelt size -0 sister had two of the regular ones and one of the white one (life is so unfair). It was good but too sweet for my taste. For some reason, all the other knights of the round table were hesitant to tasting the mooncakes. Save for my aunt gobbling up a piece, none of the other touched it. So there were a few choice pieces remaining at the table with my sister and I tragically eyeing them.
Finally, at one point of pushing a piece of mooncake unsuccessfully into my grandma's unwilling mouth, my sister surrendered to her demons and, while screaming, "if you're not going to eat it, then I will!" stuffed the piece into her own mouth instead. Luckily, my mom was too busy reading the newspaper and debating whether a Miss Hong Kong beauty contestant had gotten a boob job or not to notice.
Somehow a couple of minutes later, cookies were mentioned, and my aunt, a ginormous foodie closeted within her bony frame, brought out a tin box filled with supposedly some of Hong Kong's best. I was curious as to whether they really did lived up to their names but I dare not even think about consuming it in front of my eagle-eyed mother so I just requested to smell it. My mother said no. I was just going to smell the damn thing!
She gave in after my aunt wisely informed her that inhaling the smell would not go straight to my thighs and uncovered the tin box for me. I stuck my head out and took a deep breathe. Just as the aroma of coffee and mocha was about to waft into my nostrils--my mother yanks the box away from my face.
"That's enough," she curtly demanded and smacks the cover over the tin with a resounding thud.
Yep, my mother wouldn't even let me smell the cookies. Welcome to my world.
Oh, and apologies for the lack of food shots. The pix above was about as close as I could get to the culinary delights.
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