Mid Autumn Festival and Moon Cake

In the last two years, the story of Churn O and the Jade Rabbit was posted on our blog on the day of Harvest Moon Festival:

http://ncag.blogspot.com/2006/10/harvest-moon-festival.html
http://ncag.blogspot.com/2005/09/jade-rabbit.html

Harvest Moon Festival is also known as the Mid Autumn Festival; it is the 15th day of the 8th month on the lunar calendar. This year, Mid Autumn Festival falls on September 25, 2007.

The traditional treat for the Harvest Moon Festival is "Moon Cake". It is a very sweet very fatty pastry. These traditional moon cakes are wrapped and sold in tin cans. Photos three and four show the moon cakes in the boxes available for sale in Asian supermarkets in California. Photo two shows the unwrapped moon cake with a cut slice. The inside of the moon cake consists of sweet bean paste and a hard boil egg yolk to simulate a full moon in the dark sky.

In Asia, the traditional moon cakes are no longer popular. Alice in Taiwan sent in the first picture showing cute little pastries in the shapes of animals. It is a new trend to substitute more healthy sweets for the traditional high sugar high fat moon cakes.