Imagine my surprise when I found out that there are actually moon cakes out there that I like.  Let me rephrase that, there is actually A moon cake out there that I like.

With Mid-Autumn festival this weekend, China is being flooded with moon cakes.  Everyone, everywhere is either selling, buying, giving or assaulting people with moon cakes.  In my opinion it is the Chinese equivalent of the western fruit cake.  Except people here actually seem to enjoy them.

Moon cakes traditionally come in one of two types.  The first is made from mashed up, compressed lotus seed.  In the middle of this lotus seed is an egg yoke.  So you basically end up with a round hockey puck looking thing that kind of tastes the way a you would expect a hockey puck to taste.

The other type is made in pretty much the same way except that it is made from a combination of 6 different nuts and ground up meat.  Not much better tasting than the lotus seed version.

Every time I tell one of my Chinese friends or employees that I don’t like moon cakes, the answer is always the same.  “You just haven’t tried a good moon cake.  The ones from (insert name of home province here) are famous in China.”

My answer to their response is always, “I have tried many moon cakes.  They always taste like compressed bricks of wax.”  This answer doesn’t seem to make many people happy.  But they always turn their noses up at really good pizza, so I feel it is fair.

There are also a lot of non-traditional moon cakes made from every ingredient you can think of.  But the only one I have ever liked is the ice cream moon cakes made by Hagen Dazs.  These are VERY expensive but if I am going to be forced to eat moon cake, then these are the moon cakes I want to be forced to eat.

To the moon cake lovers out there, I do apologize.  I am not insulting moon cakes, nor am I saying that moon cakes are bad.  I am just saying that I don’t like them.  Simple.  You are free to tell me what foods you don’t like and I promise not to get mad.  See.  We can all be friends.

So Happy Mid-Autumn (Moon) Festival to one and all.  Have a great weekend.