Senior corporate chef Patrick Lin says that although the hotel's traditional lotus-seed cake sold better through pre-orders, the new deep-fried puff-pastry moon cake with mango, durian and lychee fillings - to his surprise - was by far the much more popular item at the restaurant's tasting table. In Toronto, the Metropolitan Hotel's Lai Wah Heen restaurant introduced its first modern moon cake this year. Even Haagen-Dazs and Starbucks have jumped into the fray with their green-tea flavoured and chocolate-crusted hot cakes, respectively. The most famous bakeries in Hong Kong issue certificates, similar to wine futures, that sell out months in advance. Certain box sets (such as those sold by the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, which launched its first snowy champagne moon cake in 1994) have turned into sought-after collector's items. In the last decade or so, the market for luxury moon cakes has become so heated that the Shangri-la Hotel in Beijing has a moon cake hotline. "I was at T & T the other day and they were selling frozen ice-cream moon cakes, if you can believe it," says Daryle Nagata, executive chef at the Pan Pacific Vancouver Hotel, which makes its own Canadian moon cakes with ice wine, maple syrup, hazelnuts and sun-dried cranberries. In the quest to please novelty-seeking taste buds, pastry stores, supermarkets and hotel restaurants from Shanghai to Taipei are revitalizing the 700-year-old delicacy with fancy (sometimes healthier) versions, often encased in chilled jelly or glutinous rice "snow skin" shells.Īnd now the new moon cake phenomenon is rising in Canada.
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