Handmade Mooncakes: A Taste of Season and Terroir | Grandma Kouzi
I. Everything but the iron wok is our own
Every mooncake I had tasted prior to this—whether the flaky Cantonese style, the soft-skinned variety, or snow-skin—had always contained a filling, explicitly labelled as red bean paste, date, lotus seed, or five-nut. In Chezhou, however, the mooncakes contained no filling at all.
‘Our mooncakes don’t have a filling. They never have.’ The woman making them replied with decisive finality.
She fetched a large wooden basin to knead the dough. Carved from a single block of timber, it had a round mouth and a flat base, tapering into a broad oval. The finish was deliberately rustic, clearly shaped by successive chops.
She began with flour, followed by a pour of golden rapeseed oil, and finally cracked several eggs into the mix. As she added each ingredient, she noted that both the wheat and the rapeseed were grown on their own land, and the eggs came from their own hens. The village was too small to support a flour mill or oil press, so grinding grain and extracting oil meant making a journey to a neighbouring settlement or the market town.
The final addition was a viscous, amber liquid unfamiliar to me. She explained it was malt syrup thinned with water, prepared by sprouting their own wheat and fermenting it with glutinous rice. In its raw form, malt syrup is a dense, sticky paste bordering on solid. Before use, it must be gently melted over a bain-marie, thinned with a little extra water until runny enough to incorporate into the dough.
The resulting dough possessed little elasticity but held together well, leaning towards a soft consistency. It was portioned into fist-sized balls, then rolled out into round discs roughly fourteen or fifteen centimetres across and five to six millimetres thick, before being laid upon pre-cut squares of red paper.
Baking the mooncakes required a vast flat pan, some sixty to seventy centimetres in diameter and around five or six centimetres deep. Kitchens in the village were spacious, each equipped with two distinct heat zones: a large, wood-fired range for boiling rice, stir-frying, and preparing pig feed, which was lit only when required; and a central hearth, which burned perpetually. The hearth typically kept a kettle suspended above it and a stew pot simmering to the side, with the heat adjusted as needed. For the mooncakes, the woman relied on the gentle, low heat rising from a thick bed of embers and ash.
Once the heat was set, the mooncakes, still resting on their red paper, were arranged in the base pan and set upon the hearth. A second pan, its underside carefully cleaned, was inverted over the top. The two pans were near-identical, though the upper one was marginally larger, allowing it to seal snugly without crushing the pastries beneath. Generous handfuls of dry pine needles were then placed inside this inverted pan and ignited. Once the flames were strong, a large aluminium lid was clamped over the top. This technique baked the pastries from below while gently steaming them from above, stifling the flames just enough to maintain a steady, slow burn without letting the fire die out.
II. The Rough-Hewn Beauty of Mooncakes
“Go on, eat. Except for the iron pot, everything is our own.”
I was travelling through the village as a documentary filmmaker. At the time, my culinary palate was still rather green, and like many of my urban contemporaries, I was watching my weight. So when the hostess generously offered me a freshly baked mooncake, I didn’t take the whole thing. Instead, I delicately broke off a tiny piece with two fingers.
I regretted it the moment it hit my tongue. This was unlike any mooncake, indeed any pastry, I had ever tasted.
It wasn’t “delicious” in the conventional sense. The texture wasn’t fine or smooth, there were no inventive fillings—features that might usually count against it. It somewhat resembled traditional crumbly pastries, but less greasy, softer, and not so crisp. Yet, upon tasting it, I could discern the distinct character and even the rough edges of every single ingredient. Perhaps it was because the village mill’s flour was ground more coarsely, leaving a slight grit.
Yes! That’s exactly the granular quality I remembered. The flour she used wasn’t stark white; it carried a faint brownish hue and seemed less refined. It’s only now that I realise this unbleached, additive-free flour possesses a naturally coarse elegance.
Of course, these light-brown, filling-less mooncakes offered more than just a sensory surprise. The phrase “except for the iron pot, everything is our own” made me, someone who had never touched the soil or worked the land, truly grasp the bond between people and the earth. It also highlighted the rhythm of the seasons: wheat sown in autumn and harvested in spring alongside rapeseed; fields flooded and planted with rice seedlings; rice sown in spring and gathered in autumn. After a full year of toil, the autumn harvest is the perfect time to boil malt sugar and bake mooncakes.
III. Flower Mooncakes from Woren Valley
The heart of homemade mooncakes lies in the filling. This year I made rose and gardenia versions, which could just as well be called flower cakes—though please don’t confuse them with those trendy souvenir gifts. This is a completely different pastry.
I once baked a batch with a few friends in Woren Valley. They kneaded the dough themselves. Although most ended up with cracked crusts and a less appealing look, the flavour was nothing short of heavenly. They all agreed that the flower cakes they’d eaten before had been utterly underwhelming; you could never tell whether that mass of filling was real rose petals or just rose-flavoured essence.
Roses are plagued by pests; mere survival is a triumph. Woren Valley once boasted over a hundred edible rose bushes, primarily Mo Hong and Dian Hong varieties. Their numbers dwindled over the years, leaving only about a dozen today. Every surviving bloom is rare and precious. It takes an entire year’s harvest from my garden to make just over a dozen flower cakes.
With rose jam in short supply that day, I used sugar-preserved gardenia paste for the filling, stirred through a little pre-toasted wholemeal flour. The gardenia paste needed for just a few dozen flower pastries came from several full basins of petals. As we worked, a friend kept tally: at my rate of flower consumption, all the roses in China wouldn’t be enough to cover a single week’s sales.
Roses are difficult to cultivate, but gardenias are wonderfully resilient. I’ve set aside a dedicated gardenia patch on the slopes flanking the stream behind the house: the western slope is planted with large double-flowered varieties, while the eastern slope holds the small double-flowered ones. Every tree, every branch, began in my hands—whether transplanted or rooted from cuttings. With a few years of careful tending, both slopes will be carpeted in gardenias. This year I’ve expanded the apiary to six hives. When the gardenias are in full bloom, I’ll be able to make a gardenia paste preserved in honey.
Nevertheless, achieving the goal of “everything is my own, save for the iron wok” remains a challenge: a two-month stretch of unbroken rain has completely ruined this spring’s wheat harvest, and while the peanut crop is just enough for consumption, it falls short of what is needed for oil pressing.
Yet, like the farmers in Chezhu Village, I will work the land patiently and gather my stores little by little. Sooner or later, on a day of the full moon, I will use my own flour, oil, and honey-blossom jam; light a fire with wood I felled myself; and in a clay oven I built by hand, bake a batch of honey gardenia cakes for myself, for the land, and for the seasons.
