Moon Cakes!

Last Thursday was Chinese Moon Festival. My kids are half Chinese so I decided we needed some moon cakes! I did some googling and found out Moon Festival, also known as Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrates the harvest and family, and the harvest moon...cool! People return to their villages or their hometowns and spend the day with their families, and they have a feast. It sounds kind of like Chinese Thanksgiving. And they eat mooncakes! They are pretty little pastries with lotus seed paste inside. No idea what lotus seed paste was like, but they sounded yummy. I'd never even seen a mooncake before. They are expensive, I discovered. We were shopping and I saw they had some for sale at the local Asian market. For around $30 for a box. Of four. Wow.

Moon cakes

Aren't they beautiful? Wow, so pretty. No wonder they are so expensive. Inside each one is lotus seed paste filling, and in the center is a salted egg yolk, which looks like the moon when you cut the mooncake. You are supposed to eat the mooncake by cutting it into four pieces and sharing, because it is so rich.

Lotus seed paste filling and an egg yolk in the center

The lotus seed paste tastes like sweetened peanut butter! Yummy. And the egg yolk is salty. The mooncake reminds me of a peanut butter cup, without the chocolate. It's very sweet and salty and rich. My oldest child hated the mooncake (but he is super picky and hates most foods) and my 2-year-old liked the lotus seed part but spit out the egg yolk. But I liked it!

My son and I also made some Chinese lanterns out of construction paper. It's an easy craft. Here's the instructions we used:

Chinese Lantern Tutorial

After we made and decorated our lanterns, I hung them over our dining table (taped them to the light fixture), and we went out to look at the moon, which on Moon Festival night is full, and it's supposed to be the brightest moon of the year. It was very bright, and we could see easily in the moonlight. Happy Moon Festival!