Eight To Try: Melbourne-Made Mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival 2025

It might be spring in Australia, but Mid-Autumn Festival starts on Monday October 6. Which means for much of the Asian diaspora, mooncake season has officially begun.

The harvest celebration originated over 2000 years ago and falls on the 15th day of the eighth month in the lunar calendar. Friends and families gather, light lanterns and often share mooncakes – a pastry that takes many forms.

The festival is celebrated in China and many other Asian countries. Cantonese mooncakes – golden pastries filled with a lotus-seed paste and a salted egg yolk centre – are arguably the most common type you’ll see here. You can typically find them at Asian grocers and bakeries around the city. But mooncakes are extremely varied depending on regions and individuals.

Here’s a guide to different kinds of mooncakes you’ll find in Melbourne, and the best places to find them.

Hong Kong custard mooncakes

These treats were created in the Spring Moon Restaurant kitchen at the Hong Kong Peninsula Hotel back in 1986. Custard mooncakes are made using a European-style cookie crust rather than the pastry of Cantonese mooncakes.

Joy Jaune

Pastry chef Joey Leung of Preston Market shop Joy Jaune has been making mooncakes since she was a kid growing up in Hong Kong. Leung started making salted egg custard mooncakes to sell back in 2020, when the pandemic increased demand for the treats. In addition to custard mooncakes, she’s making miso black sesame, Uji matcha and Uji hojicha mooncakes, available to be shipped or picked up from Joy Jaune.

This year, Leung is also collaborating with Chinatown’s Museum of Chinese Australian History on a tieguanyin (a type of oolong tea) mooncake that will be available at the museum on Sunday October 5 from 11am until sold out.

Chaoshan-style or thousand-layer mooncakes

Made using a laminated pastry that often contains lard or shortening, these flaky, spiralised pastries can be stuffed with sweet or savoury fillings.

Raya

Mooncake drops at Raymond Tan ’s Malaysian bakery Raya on Little Collins Street are almost as sought-after as new Supreme collabs. This year, Raya is offering six mooncakes: three Cantonese-style treats (filled with yuzu and lychee; hojicha and pistachio; and white lotus and salted egg yolk) and three flaky thousand-layer ones, which come filled with pandan and coconut; hazelnut cream and red bean; and peanut and black sesame paste. Each year, the Raya team gets creative with its mooncake packaging. For 2025, you’ll find mooncake boxes that playfully riff on Ikea packaging. Raya mooncakes are also available at Tan’s other shops Dua and Nimbo.

Snow-skin mooncakes

These unbaked mooncakes are made by wrapping filling in a mochi-like skin made from glutinous rice flour.

Soon Guan Delicacies

Baker Chee Ying is the one-woman force behind Soon Guan Delicacies. Ying makes intricate flaky thousand-layer mooncakes, but her snow-skin versions, which get their marbled colour from natural fruit and vegetable powders, are standouts. This year, she’s making camellia-shaped and rabbit-shaped mooncakes in six flavours including black sesame; Musang King durian; and cookies and cream with sea salt. Soon Guan Delicacies’ mooncakes are available for pre-order via Instagram.

Kori Ice-Cream

Kori, the Japanese ice-cream shop from pastry chefs Joane Yeoh and Bernard Chu with spots in the CBD and Hawthorn , has teamed up with Malaysian patisserie Voilà on four frozen snow-skin mooncakes. Flavours include ashmere, a blueberry compote sandwiched between matcha ice-cream and semifreddo covered in a purple sweet potato snow-skin; and blush and bloom – white peach compote with strawberry milk ice-cream and jasmine semifreddo wrapped in strawberry snow-skin.

Shanghainese mooncakes

Shanghainese mooncakes are traditionally flakier than their Cantonese counterparts and are made using short-crust pastry.

New Shanghai

Chinese restaurant chain New Shanghai makes more than 10 sweet and savoury mooncakes. On the savoury side are options like prawn; nori, pork floss and salted egg yolk; and black truffle and pork. Sweet mooncakes include durian; lotus and salted egg yolk; and coconut, sweet red dates and pine nuts. They’re available at all locations.

Banh nuong

These Vietnamese mooncakes use a similar pastry shell to Cantonese-style mooncakes, but the fillings differ by region in Vietnam. Tung Nguyen, owner of Vietnamese dessert shop Che, tells Broadsheet that mungbean, and mixed nuts and Chinese sausage more typical of the north; black sesame and mungbean mooncakes more common in the centre of the country; and more fruity flavours and coconut are typically seen in the south.

Viet Thanh Homemade Cakes

Cook and creative Jessica Nguyen says it’s common for people who live in the west to drive to Springvale just to get mooncakes from this bakery. Viet Thanh Homemade Cakes has Shanghainese-style mooncakes and banh nuong with fillings such as durian, mung bean paste and taro.

Banh deo

These Vietnamese snow-skin mooncakes have a short shelf life due to their mochi-like skin. In the past few years, Tung says coconut and com (young rice that Tung says is similar in flavour to pandan, and “gives you a special texture, like a mix between glutinous rice and jasmine rice”) has become a popular filling in Vietnam, particularly in Hanoi.

Chè

Every year, Nguyen’s CBD dessert shop Chè sells thousands of mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival.

The banh deo are made fresh multiple times a week and are filled with matcha as well as coconut and com, while the banh nuong come in three different fillings: durian, black sesame and mung bean, and mixed nuts.

Taiwanese 3Q mooncakes

“Q” or “QQ” is a way of denoting texture. In Taiwan, Q is a sought-after texture that means a dish has a desirable bounciness (similar to well-prepared tapioca pearls in a bubble tea drink). 3Q Taiwanese mooncakes are named for the “Q” textured mochi that, along with red bean paste, pork floss and salted egg yolk, is wrapped in flaky pastry.

Amour Desserts

Er Rin Tan started making mooncakes when she emigrated from Malaysia to Australia in 2008 and struggled to find the high-quality mooncakes she was used to seeing back home. Tan’s Amour Desserts sells all kinds of mooncakes including snow-skin and Cantonese-style cakes with lotus seed paste and salted egg yolk. It’s also one of the only places in Melbourne where you can get Taiwanese 3Q mooncakes. Mooncakes must be pre-ordered.

Additional reporting by Lily Beamish