August 17, 2010
The scent of burnt pastry that time of the year again. Before you want them to be sold out, send your loved ones something else from outer-space this mid-autumn festival- moon pie, not cake.
Moon Pie (SGD 11.00 for 8)
They have been around since 1984. When you don't want mooncake on the 15th day. Or when you try to find a rainbow mooncake.
Note: This is an oxo-biodegradable bag. Meaning: the plastic will degrade, in a couple of months or a year or so! Very encouraging to be hoisted around during the mooncake festival.
Rainbow: why, when they are pies, not cakes. What your specialist tells you to eat a rainbow of foods. The reds and pinks with lycopenes to prevent heart diseases, greens for anti-cancer and detoxifying properties, rich purples with anthocyanins that are powerful antioxidants, your white flavonoids which exhibit antioxidant properties too, and black with isoflavins, minerals and anthocyanins.
All found on the moon pie. The pink sesame is red bean flavour, green sesame sparkle green tea flavour, green sesame drenched-in pandan moon pie, purple sesame yam flavour, black sesame-studded coffee moon pie, black and white sesame black sesame paste moon pie, chocolate swirl also black sesame flavour, and lastly white sesame(out of the picture) original lotus seed paste.
A pie and a cake; so what is the difference in moon? It has got to be its crust. The moon pie is more crumbly, more airy; hence less rich with almost no butter taste! The paste differs too, invariably, and the yam here is a special mix of lotus seed and yam. Oriental lotus quelling the earthy yam abit. The purple sesame seeds were like 'air pockets', wonderful sensation akin to popping popcorn!
The black sesame sparse do not be fooled by it. Its coffee! Finally, coffee paste that does not taste like chendol!(So far most commercial brews reek of the dessert, we might as well be eating dessert than having elevenses). Its chameleonic- somewhere through its acrid like kopi-o, other at times it guises as old gold chocolate. 'Coffee' of dark chocolate.
What about pastries is, trying hard not to find the sugar. White sugar/raw sugar/gula melaka; unless it is more differentiated like honey or molasses. When we are nit-picky about that delicate balance between the fruit/vegetable/food compound itself, and the condiment to provide universal approval- sugar and its sorts. LE is the master of this trade.
Moon pie, in the size of a golf ball, it is understood as to why a moon pie. Because of this unappraised dimension, it is best to be shared in triangles, like how a family devours a whole mooncake. And the crust soft like a nonya or pineapple tart's, not glazed or flavoured like a traditional mooncake.
Kurogoma, black and white sesame seeds for black sesame moon pie. The most preposterous black sesame paste so rich; rich becomes lighter because there is no leeway for sugar! A dealer in sesame I'd always go for tahini, not sesame paste whenever I had a choice; hence I was determined in sounding-out LE here. But it was a good reap because this one's concentrated sesame paste!
The red bean on the left with pink sesame seeds isn't like red bean bun or red bean mee chiang kueh! Red bean ≠ white sugar; until everybody forgets that red bean's a bean! Like a flavour within a cake. However it seemed that red bean was the sugar used to sweeten this red bean paste. So mellow, it sets a horizon beside the flour crust; the most enigmatic for me a 'plain' flavour that I can no longer recognise! Arguably my favourite, though with a green tea moon pie on the right! Like 611 green tea tau sar piah, it emanates jasmine, undeniably high and exalted!
Finally, the original flavour. If you warm it up, it tastes like a scone, and you suddenly cannot conjecture why there are more flavours in a moon pie. This is because of the seamless pairing; lotus seed paste for a sweet and savoury sensation, sesame seeds adding as 'dimensional butter' to the soft pastry, no other ingredients to complicate the tastebud!
The most luxurious paste ever for a mooncake; highlights the generation of the moon pie too. The lotus seed paste garnering exorbitant prices. Traditionally, no moon pie taste so superbly sweet though, where you have to tolerate sweetness like a rite. (With drinking tea or the essentiality to be riddled with melon seeds, they are just so sweet, here; have a bite). Well, the original moon pie is a more properly thought-out confection.
Chocolate rimming the surface- Original, Red Bean, Coffee, Black sesame or Black and white sesame flavour? Which one is it, quick? Well LE was lively in giving the chocolate a twist- no, not original, original's more exotic than chocolate, not red bean either, chocolate cannot demarcate red bean, and when you think it is smart enough to be coffee; no, not mocha, brown for brown, its black sesame! So this is black sesame with chocolate on the top! (The same mudpie paste as the one with black and white sesame seeds, though that is referred to as the black and white sesame flavour.) Seeds green but tickled unevenly, it is the pandan juice. The whites look like they are shedding green.
The pandan moon pie is coloured brilliantly inside, but the taste is very mild of pandan. The paste is comely thick but light. Pandan, the most solacing neutral flavour for someone who does not like traditional tastes- ekk bean paste, no seeds please, green tea too eccentric, I don't take kopi-o.
P.S. Still, how can there be not one flavour that taste not cordial? Acclimatization to localised tastes, peanut or red bean appeals to me- how will those who grow up drinking foreign water take to these fillings? When it was either chocolate or cheese. Thinking of it there was not much choice anyway, besides this vanilla, peanut butter, or strawberry; anything else it is outlandish.
