02 November 2018 by Christina Barker
Lihui recently went over to China to visit friends and family. She very kindly bought me back a real moon cake! I was excited to receive a real one to try after seeing Suyen making them out of air-drying clay and seeing real ones in photos.
I'm always very wary about eating anything 'foreign' to me. We have a very strict food law here in the UK. Everything must be packaged with clear labels enabling us to decide if we want to purchase the item or not. They need to use what they call a traffic light system. Red for the high-fat/sugar content and green for healthy, yellow for moderate. We can also see lots of other information about where the item has come from, where it's made, how much energy it gives you etc. They must also show a list of ingredients along with any allergens in bold. For some reason, we tend to have a lot of allergies here and it is becoming more and more common so being able to read these is a must if you do have allergies. As this is the expected here, this is the reason I find it difficult when not knowing all this information as we are so used to it.
On inspecting the mooncake packaging, obviously, I am unable to read any Mandarin but there are no listed ingredients and the only English is to say it's a moon cake which, being from the UK I don't know too much about at this point.
Nevertheless, I open the packaging to inspect the mooncake further. It felt a little squashy but not like the kind of cake we are used to here. I cut it open and inside, it is filled with a dark brown filling which looks like it could be chocolate. Upon smelling it, it doesn't smell anything like chocolate. It's more like coffee and unfortunately, I am not a coffee lover. From the smell, I was certain I wouldn't like it but as I always say to my children, 'how do you know you don't like it unless you try it?'. So with that, I tried a couple of small bites. It wasn't to my taste but I can see how others would enjoy it.
