MOONCAKE

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The image of the kites must have left an impression. Today was a mooncake-making workshop ahead of the mid-autumn festival. Actually not so much making of mooncakes, rather a few steps in the assembly process. The full process goes something like this. Step 1: prepare your sugar syrup. Step 2: wait for 6 months for it to mature. Step 3: make your pastry. Step 4 wait 3 days for it to harden, or was it soften? or something else?... Actually we did have a go at kneading the dough for a few minutes each, before it was set aside for another day. We instead used dough prepared by others a few days before.

The moment our expertise was required was in putting the components together. What we did was to make a disc of lotus seed paste and wrap it around a salted duck egg yolk to form a ball. Then, we formed a disc of the pre-hardened (or softened, or whatever) dough and wrapped that around the egg/lotus seed ball, to give a ball of three layers. This was then pushed gently into a mould to make the "cake" with a pattern on the top. The difficult bit was extracting it from the mould, which required some physical persuasion. The kitchen sounded like a building site with twenty people banging wooden moulds onto metal benches. A simplified (Chinese) recipe was followed by making red bean paste mooncakes.

Next the mooncake goes into the oven for a week. No, only joking, for half an hour. In the meantime, we had to decorate our boxes, in a Blue Peter fashion. Since traditionally mooncakes are given as gifts, they are typically presented in rather fancy boxes, as is the wannabe-Japanese culture in this country. But what design to go for with the home-made mooncake? Not one for the customary rabbits, lotus flowers or birds, I went urban: a silhouetted skyline of offices and a warehouse: that's the real 上海 (well Pudong). But to add some jolity, I included the kites from the previous week. Amazingly, a number of teachers who were also in our group devoted a huge effort to detailing my design: what a true team effort! The result was... let's say, unique. However, the team of teachers really came into its own when designing the apps for the iPad box. Like many real apps, they have remained inactive on the box for weeks. Better than real apps they have never needed updating. I think that's called innovation nowadays. Cheng'e* and the jade rabbit in the moon*, would both be pleased.

*check Luigipedia

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