Every August, you start to see towers of pretty boxes cluttering up the entrances of Asian grocers – the mooncakes are back in town. That’s a sign you need to check your calendar and your family group chat and get ready for Mid-Autumn Festival – the festival of the harvest moon.
“I personally like to get my mooncakes a month ahead,” says Raymond Tan, founder of Melbourne bakery Raya. In the past, he’s even asked friends to bring back mooncakes from overseas so they can have a month-long tasting party.
Of course, here in Australia, the festival takes place in spring rather than autumn. But what’s beautiful and unifying is that no matter where you are in the world, you can catch a worshipful glimpse of the full moon – even if it’s upside-down. And you can eat something round in its honour – such as mooncakes.
The festival dates back to the Shang dynasty, some 3000 years ago. It’s tangled up in myths about the moon goddess Chang’e, her archer husband Hou Yi and their complicated long-distance relationship – which features a thief, a tyrant, a rabbit and a potion. There’s also a 700-year-young legend of how concealed messages in mooncakes helped insurgents organise an uprising against the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty.
But most Asian Australians nowadays are less fussed with the folklore and more focused on food, family and friends. As Tan says, “It’s more an excuse to get together.”
Getting together means gifting and sharing mooncakes. Cantonese-style mooncakes are the most well-known and widely available: dense pucks with rich filling inside a thin, glossy, soft crust moulded with intricate designs. Common fillings include lotus seed paste, red bean paste, or mixed seeds and nuts, and many also feature whole salted egg yolks, which resemble mini moons in their oily orange glow.
Suzhou-style mooncakes, on the other hand, are more like round meat pies, with pork filling in a flaky crust stamped with red dye. Teochew mooncakes are different again, with flaky pastry in a spiral design. There are countless regional variants throughout Asia, and new interpretations emerge every year.
“Different generations have different mooncakes,” says Joey Leung, the founder and pastry chef behind Melbourne’s Joy Jaune. When she was a little kid in Hong Kong, she remembers only a handful of flavours. She’d save the mooncake tins to use as a piggybank for her pocket money.
By the time she started high school, fashions were changing. “People were getting wealthier, they were looking for something different and new, so custard mooncakes were born. That was actually invented by a dim sum chef at The Peninsula Hotel in the late ’80s,” she says.
This east-meets-west mooncake was the first flavour Leung made herself when she launched her business in 2020. But nowadays, one of her most sought-after flavours is a miso black sesame liu-sa that combines the dazzle of flowing black custard with the complex umami of shiro miso. It’s a favourite of her customers at Preston Market.
For Tan, who grew up in Malaysia with Teochew parents, his childhood staple was traditional Teochew mooncakes with yam filling. “But my all-time favourite flavour is actually from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, a champagne truffle snowskin mooncake. It’s very fancy,” he says. Snowskin mooncakes use a mochi pastry for a springy, translucent exterior.
At Raya, Tan makes both Cantonese and Teochew mooncakes with Southeast Asian flavours like pandan and coconut, as well as cookie-inspired fillings like pistachio and white chocolate, or matcha and macadamia.
While fresh, handmade mooncakes are still a relatively small business in Australia, demand has increased dramatically in recent years. Tan attributes some of this growing interest to the 2020 Netflix animated film, Over the Moon.
“I think people started noticing mooncakes,” he says. Over the course of four years, Raya’s output has grown from 150 boxes in 2021 to 1000 boxes in 2024. “We don’t want people to miss out – last year when we started getting traction, we had already sold out, so this year we tried to avoid that.”
The mooncakes, it seems, are multiplying. Australian contemporary artists Hwafern Quach and Phuong Ngo have their own creative take. Their ongoing collaboration Slippage adds 888 ceramic celadon-glazed mooncakes in each iteration of the artwork – a comment on the commonalities across Asian cultures and a critique of China’s expansionism in the South China Sea.
Whether or not mooncakes really helped topple Mongol rule back in the Yuan dynasty, it seems they can still play a revolutionary role today – whether they’re made of shortcrust pastry, mochi snowskin or clay.
This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.
