Hi everyone! Did you celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival? This year, the festival was held on September 17th. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the moon from my house in China. I hope everyone could see it from where you are living.　

In China, people celebrate their Mid-Autumn Festival on the same day as Japan. And it is one of China’s National Holidays. I saw many people outside who looked like they were going back home for the celebration and to spend time with their families.

My neighbor who is from South Korea also told me that “today is just as important a day for us as New Year’s. Today is Korean Thanksgiving!” I felt happy to hear that because everyone is celebrating today’s moon festival!

Around this time last year, our family enjoyed tasting different kinds of Chinese mooncakes at home. Here is my blog post about it if you are interested.

This year, I found a mooncake-making set from Taobao, which is a Chinese online shopping app. (Oh, btw I also made Tsukimi-Dango, a traditional Japanese sweet for the Moon Festival and Nerikiri Wagashi!)

We made two types of mooncakes. One is called Snow Skin Mooncake and the other is called Guangzhou-style mooncake.

_{The manufacturing date is printed on the package.}

The Snow Skin Mooncake has a soft chewy texture and filling flavor is “金沙奶黄 (Golden Sand Custard)”. The Golden Sand Custard is mixed with salted egg yolk and custard cream. Guangzhou-style mooncake is a type that needs to be baked in the oven. For this one, I picked black sesame filling.

Basically, I made the mooncake dough and my children enjoyed making balls from the dough and the mooncake shapes using the cute molds.

Guangzhou-style mooncake dough.

Snow Skin Mooncake dough.

In the picture above, my daughter is having a difficult time to close the mochi after wrapping the filling because I sprinkled too much corn starch.

I used this corn starch to avoid the mochi dough sticking too much on my hands.

In the picture above, the size of the ball of dough was a little bit big and as you can see some of the dough was squished out from the mooncake mold. hehe

My youngest said “I did a great job!” by pointing out her creation!

It was really fun and exciting, especially when we could see the mooncake being made from the mold. When the mooncake looked perfect coming out of the mold, we had a scream of delight! There are so many designs of mooncake molds, so I want to collect more later from Taobao!

We made a lot of the mooncakes and we shared them with my neighbor and friends. But we still have a lot of them at home!

In the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival, my Korean friend shared Korean traditional sweet called “Yaksik” with me.

Yaksik is made from glutinous rice, chestnuts, jujubes, and pine nuts. I could taste some brown sugar, soy sauce, and a hint of cinnamon as well. It was very yummy! My friend told me that Yaksik is often made during their important holidays, such as this Mid-Autumn Festival and also New Year.

I placed Japanese, Chinese, and Korean traditional sweets together, and took a picture for my memory Isn’t so gorgeous!?

This year’s Moon Festival was so much fun making the mooncakes and tasting Korean traditional sweet called Yaksik!

Thank you for reading my blog!