With the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival close at hand, I’d like to report about confections in Hong Kong, as I saw them in the early part of September.

Changes in Moon Cake

China has a festival called the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated on the 15th night of the eighth month according to the traditional calendar. People admire the moon, celebrate the autumn harvest, and pray to the god of earth. Celebrations include the custom of giving moon cake to close friends and relatives and to benefactors. Moon cake is typically round baked buns, but in recent years, unbaked cakes made of glutinous rice jelly filled with whipped cream or ice cream have begun to appear in places such as southern China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. There are many varieties of fillings, including coffee, chocolate, strawberry, tiramisu, cheese, and green tea. They are wrapped individually and sold in colorful cans.

This raw type of moon cake has been a great hit in Hong Kong, and they have been seen in areas that have similar temperatures and humidity, such as southern China, Taiwan, and Macao.

The State of Hong Kong’s Confection Industry

Hong Kong is small, and unlike Japan, it has no custom of going home for holidays, nor does it have any customs in which midsummer or year-end gifts are given. Moreover, people rarely buy and stock food for later use, possibly because of the temperature and humidity, so purchases of confections make up a large part of household expenditures.

Even in Hong Kong, which doesn’t have the kinds of gift-giving customs that Japan has, moon cakes in the Mid-Autumn Festival are different. People give them to their close friends and relatives and to their benefactors. At the beginning of September, Hong Kong’s supermarkets, the food sales areas of department stores, and confectionery shops are adorned with colorful packages of moon cakes, including the raw type.

There is no clear distinction between confectionery shops and bakeries, and both candy and baked goods are often sold in the same shop. It seems that in most cases, people buy bread in the morning, then buy sweets in the same shop in the afternoon, usually eating it soon afterward. The most common sweets are mango or strawberry cake, cheesecake, and chocolate cake, and on the whole, people seem to like confections that contain slightly sour fruits, tapioca, and coconut milk.

When I looked around at the Kornhill branch of the Hong Kong JUSCO, which just reopened in July of this year after remodeling, and just as you might expect in a Japanese-style department store, there was a Santoka Ramen restaurant, and an Ootoya restaurant specializing in complete Japanese meals with side dishes, as well as Hong Kong’s second branch of Sakura-street, a shop owned by the Hotland Corporation that specializes in dorayaki confections. Inside this branch of Sakura-street, customers could watch Dorayaki filled with fresh cream being made before buying them.

The fillings are the same as in Japan, with the most popular ones being tiramisu, and strawberry custard. They sell for HK$16, or about ¥240.

Most of the buyers were younger people, and they seem to have become fond of the chilled Dorayaki filled with fresh cream sold there. I felt that the fact that raw moon cakes have become available may be a sign of changing tastes among Hong Kong’s young people.

 
Admiralty Street in Hong Kong

Raw moon cakes, sold chilled and packed in colorful cans. Customers take them home in insulated packs filled with a refrigerant.

The second branch of Sakura-street in the Kornhill branch of Hong Kong JUSCO.