This is a moon cake, and for the past week or two they have been passed pretty liberally around Hong Kong as people celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Said festival always falls on a full-moon (i.e. last Friday), hence ‘moon cake’. They’re interesting… Beyond being round, they don’t look much like the moon. Yet the real liberty is taken in using the word ‘cake’. In my book, cakes don’t consist of pastry-encased thick lotus paste, or have the salted yolk of a duck egg hiding in the middle. But these do. I was genuinely excited to try them for the first time last year – they do look pretty nice after all – yet my disappointment, like the aftertaste, still lingers. It sums up one of the most testing aspects of living in the Far East: namely their twisted ideas as to what exactly should be involved in a desert or a cake – whether it be egg, potato or the dreaded red bean. The worst of it is, though, like the dumb moth to the bright flame, I keep trying these treats in the hope that one day, somehow, one of them will be normal.