Mooncake is here to stay

SANDAKAN – The Mid-Autumn Festival is also known as the Mooncake Festival, as the festival is not the same without mooncake, the Chinese traditional pastry.  

As the Chinese tradition in Sandakan continues from one generation to another, the Mooncake Festival remains a “must-celebrate” day here.  

The Mooncake Festival falls on September 21 this year, and homemade mooncake sellers here had begun ordering and buying ingredients to bake mooncake since early August.  

Luke Kim Yoong, 54, who is originally from Ipoh said that she learned how to bake mooncake in 1994 and started selling them in 1995.  

One year after another, Luke would improvise her mooncake to fit the market demand.

She said she had gone from a typical mooncake made with red bean paste or lotus seed paste, to jelly mooncake with salted duck egg yolk and lotus seed paste filling.  

“The demand for the typical mooncake has been dropping while more people are selling them, increasing my competitors. I then thought of selling something different.  

“People would criticise that my jelly mooncake is not ‘traditional’, but my jelly mooncake has its own fans, particularly those who feel that the typical mooncake is too sweet.  

“I also put salted duck egg yolk and make the shape of the mooncake exactly like the traditional ones, preserving the concept of having a moon-shaped (yolk) in the mooncake,” she said.  

Luke said she could only take limited orders as she is making the mooncake on her own without help, and had accepted her largest order of about 300 boxes.  

“The sales have dropped because of the pandemic. It is probably because most families would have small celebration instead of big gathering, and the economy is also not good now,” she said, adding that she has sold over 100 boxes of jelly mooncake this year.  

Luke said that her customers vary from those who want to enjoy the mooncakes themselves, to those who are buying them as gifts to other families.  

Meanwhile, self-taught mooncake baker, Mandy Chiang said that she had only learned how to bake mooncake last year, via online tutorials on Youtube and Facebook.  

“I decided to learn because I was inspired by the Hong Kong drama. I also want my kids to enjoy traditional homemade mooncake,” the mother of two said.  

Chiang said she finds that mooncake is still highly popular among the Chinese community in Sandakan as the ingredients to bake mooncake such as lotus seed paste, read bean paste and golden syrup had sold out about a month before the actual day of the festival.  

“After learning how to bake mooncake for my family and relatives, I took a brave step to open order for sale this year. I start small but I am very happy to have sold 15 boxes of mooncake so far.  

“To me, Mooncake Festival means that a family gets to be reunited and chatting with each other, at a table full of warmth, comfort and food.  

“For my family, we would talk about those good old days and also the latest news about each other while enjoying fruits, mooncake, peanuts and watching the kids playing with their lantern,” she said.  

The prices of mooncake have been rising rapidly here.  

In Sandakan, mooncakes are easily available in any bakery or supermarket about a month before the actual celebration.  

From about RM8 per piece in ten years ago, a piece of mooncake could now cost from RM12 to RM19 per piece, depending on its ingredients. 

However, a local father of two, Hing Dick Khiang, 32, said despite the hike in mooncake’s prices, he had bought seven boxes of mooncakes this year.  

“I gave six boxes to my friends and relatives, and a box for my own family. Usually, even though I only buy a box for myself, I would end up with more than five boxes of mooncake on the festival because my friends and relatives would also give mooncake to me as gift. 

“It is something that my parents did in the past; now I am doing the same after I started my own family,” he said.  

With the tradition of buying, consuming and gifting mooncake still popular to this day, it is safe to say that the sweet pastry is here to stay. – The Vibes, September 21, 2021