Melbourne mooncake sales soar for Mid-Autumn festival

For the past week, Amour Desserts owner Er Rin Tan has been surviving on two hours sleep a night and rest isn't coming soon. It's mooncake season and the baker is overwhelmed with orders.

"Maybe it's due to Melbourne's lockdown, I don't know, but this year mooncake sales have exploded," she says. "I'm run off my feet trying to make and deliver all the orders. Mooncakes are a lot of work."

Traditionally eaten by east Asian cultures to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, mooncakes are dense little pastries often enjoyed with tea. For the past five years, they have been surging in popularity.

"There has been a big trend in Asia to make mooncakes more contemporary and appealing to a younger generation," says Anthony Tam, strategy manager for New Shanghai restaurants in Chadstone and the CBD.

"That's influencing the Australian market too. Lotus seed paste and salted egg yolk are the traditional fillings, but now we're seeing mooncakes filled with anything from truffles, to yuzu and durian fruit.

"Snow-skin mooncakes are particularly trendy. With a soft, chewy texture, they're similar to a Japanese mochi."

Also known as the Moon Festival in Australia, Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. In 2020, that's October 1, but Tan isn't accepting any more mooncake orders for the main day.

"We're still delivering mooncakes for another two weeks, but right now we're at production capacity until at least October 3," she says.

Amour Desserts best-selling mooncake is its Exotic Nyonya flavour, featuring a spicy sambal mix surrounded by buttery shortcrust pastry.

"We cook down chilli, onion and lemongrass and mix in lotus paste for sweetness," she says. "Our Taiwanese-style mooncake is very popular too. That one is made with flaky pastry and coated with sesame seeds. Inside is red bean paste, pork floss and salted-egg. People seem to like it when we mix sweet and savoury together."

Manager of Sydney's iconic Golden Century restaurant, Billy Wong, remembers the mooncakes of his childhood as being a less-than-thrilling affair.

"When I was a kid, it was more like 'oh, it's that old thing again'," he says.

"The traditional lotus seed cakes could be quite sweet and heavy. Until quite recently, maybe the last four or five years, fresh mooncakes were hard to track down in Australia. Most were imported from Asia, plastic-wrapped and full of preservatives. Now people are eating them because they're fresh and exciting."

Tam says the imported mooncakes found at Asian grocers are usually a southern Chinese-style of the treat, with fillings such as mixed nuts and red bean. "Our fresh mooncakes at New Shanghai have flakier pastry and more savoury flavours than the southern-style ones. A bit like a pork pie, really."

New Shanghai mooncake flavours include black sesame, mixed nut, pork and durian, and can still be purchased fresh and frozen from its Melbourne stores. "You don't have to wait until October 1 to eat them, though," says Tam. "Enjoy them as fresh and warm as you can."