Every 15th day of the 8th month in the Chinese Lunar Calendar, the Chinese and Vietnamese celebrate the mid-Autumn Festival which is also the Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival.

This is actually a festival that celebrates bountiful harvest of the year.  The most common reminder that the mid-Autumn is upon us in Vietnam when bakeshops such as Kinh Do start putting temporary shops along major thoroughfares selling their famous mooncakes.

So you cannot imagine what I’ve been eating in the office for the past 2 weeks: mooncakes!  The office has been receiving different mooncakes from different bakeshops and we too have been giving out mooncakes for clients.  Mooncake overload I tell you!

Back home, I’m not sure how many flavors they come up with mooncakes, but here, there’s a whole separate menu for mooncakes alone.  So far, I like those with the egg BUT not the vegetarian and durian flavors.  No durian please.

So far, I’ve tried Kinh Do, Savoure, Brodard, and The Baker’s Cottage from Goodfood.

Among the four, The Baker’s Cottage (TBC) is the yummiest for me. 🙂  I actually saw this being sold in Queenland Mart and man, for one box with 4 mooncakes, this costs 529,000 VND!  Usually, a mooncake (250 g – 300 g) costs around 80,000 VND each.  So TBC is really expensive!  This is usually served in hotels.  Good thing I was able to try this for free in the office because I don’t think I can afford to buy a box myself.

Happy Mooncake Festival everyone!