Tomorrow will be Mooncake Festival. Here’s wishing everyone Happy Mooncake Festival tomorrow. Children would be playing tanglung, eating mooncake and pamelos. Some elders would be buying items to pray to deities and to the moon.
Store selling tanglung or laterns
Here there are stationery stores selling laterns or tanglung. This year, there are a lot of Angry Bird tanglungs- and other bateri operated tanglungs. So sometimes it is nicer to see stores selling the old designs- below, the peacock tanglung is sold for RM6.90.
Below, the tanglung in the shape of the dragon looks a little like what I had when I was young. We are not really well off, so mom would buy us one tanglung to be used for few years. Every year during Pesta Tanglung or the mooncake festival, we would take out our laterns and play with them- there is a middle portion where we can stick a candle inside and it would be lighted. At the same time, adult would take their kids to go and walk around the neigborhood with the tanglungs and we would all say hi to one another. Our families would light candles at the gate and everywhere you would see nice candle lights with a festive feel.
Dragon tanglung
After the festival is over, mom would carefully wrap our tanglung with newspaper and plastic and put in on top of the cupboard so that it does not get wrecked.
Those days were fun- everyone knew one another. It has been years since I’ve seen people doing that now.
Below are the new varieties of mooncake: agar agar mooncake or jelly mooncake. I prefer these than the traditional ones for the agar agar comes with different colours and flavors:
Jelly mooncake sold at pasar malam
This stall at the nightmarket would sell various varieties and each mooncake is sold for RM5.50 each. It is much cheaper than the traditional ones because it is easier to make than traditional mooncakes like lotus or kam tui. Here are the flavors available for jelly mooncake:
- Cendol
- Corn
- Champagne
- Strawberry
- Dragon fruit
- Yam
- Cappuccino
- Lycee
- Orange
- Blueberry
- Mint
- Watermelon
- Honeydew
- Apple
- Mango
- Ice Cream mooncake
For those who want to learn how to make agar agar mooncake, there are recipes available online as well as classes from Bake with Yen (that is usually available few months prior to mooncake festival). The seller at the night market could have learned from a class and then sell them and improvise the recipe along the way. Well, there’s always next year if you wanna learn 🙂
Happy Mooncake Festival.
