mid autumn festival

It's Friday again.
It's mid September.

Mooncakes have been sent and are eaten all over town, because here in Hong Kong it's Mid Autumn Festival. Mooncakes are expensive and considered a delicacy, and the production is labor-intensive so it's popular and common among companies to buy them and give them to their clients as presents. (I don't like them though, so the ones I have received I have passed on to one of my colleagues, which definitely made her smile, so all is good :-))

These traditional Chinese pastries have an imprint on top consisting of Chinese characters and are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. A thick filling usually made from lotus seed paste is surrounded by a relatively thin crust. One or more whole salted egg yolks in its center is also common to symbolize the full moon. Hence the name...

So where did the tradition of these special cakes come from?
Well mooncakes were used as a medium by the Ming revolutionaries in their espionage effort to secretly distribute letters in order to overthrow the Mongolian rulers of China in the Yuan dynasty. The message was either hidden inside the cake and/or printed in the surface of the mooncake as a simple puzzle or mosaic. In order to read the encrypted message, each of the 4 mooncakes packaged together had to be cut into 4 parts each. The 16 pieces of mooncake, then had to be pieced together in such a fashion that the secret messages could be read... Afterwards the pieces of mooncake were eaten to destroy the message.
Smart hey?!

Anyway, Mid Autumn Festival also means public holiday. So we get a long weekend since we've got Monday off. Hurray!

It's beautiful weather outside, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way all weekend.
It's 41 days until I see Kris.
It's soon time to call it a day at the office.
It's time to drink that first Diet Coke of the week.
It's time to let the weekend take me where ever it wants to take me... I'll keep you posted on where...