Homemade Mooncakes: Savouring the Season and the Land | Grandma Kouzi
I. Everything but the iron pot is my own
Every mooncake I had eaten before—whether flaky, soft, or snow-skin—had a filling, clearly labelled as red bean paste, jujube paste, lotus seed paste, or mixed nuts. But in Chezhou village, the mooncakes had no filling.
“Our mooncakes have no filling. They never have,” the woman making them told me quite bluntly.
She produced a massive wooden basin to mix the dough. The basin had been hollowed out from a single piece of timber; it was oval with a round rim and a flat bottom, its workmanship coarse and clearly carved out with a series of hacking blows.
First went the flour, followed by a golden pour of rapeseed oil, and then the eggs. As she worked, she explained that the wheat and rapeseed were grown by the villagers, and the eggs came from their own chickens. The village was too small for its own mill or oil press, so they had to travel to a larger neighbouring village or the town to grind their flour and press their oil.
I didn’t recognise the thick, brown liquid she added last, but she told me it was maltose mixed with water, made from their own sprouted wheat and glutinous rice. In its natural state, maltose is a semi-liquid, sticky substance, almost solid; before use, it must be gently warmed in a pot over a bain-marie and diluted with a little water to make it thin enough for kneading.
The resulting dough had almost no elasticity, yet it didn’t crumble; it was rather soft. She divided it into fist-sized portions, then rolled them into discs about fourteen or fifteen centimetres in diameter and five or six millimetres thick, placing each on a pre-cut square of red paper.
Making these mooncakes required a huge flat-bottomed pan, sixty or seventy centimetres in diameter and about five or six centimetres deep. The village kitchens were spacious enough to have two heat sources, divided into ‘military’ and ‘civil’ fires: the large wood-fired stove for cooking meals and boiling pig feed was lit only when needed, while the hearth fire generally burned year-round. Kettles hung above it and soup pots simmered beside it, the heat adjusted as required. For the mooncakes, they used the ‘civil’ fire—the gentle heat emanating from a thick bed of embers and ash.
Once the heat was right, the mooncakes, still on their red paper, were arranged in the pan. This pan was set upon the hearth, and then another flat-bottomed pan, its base cleaned, was placed on top of it. The two pans were nearly identical, though the upper one was slightly larger, allowing it to seal the bottom pan tightly without crushing the cakes. A heap of pine needles and wood chips were then placed inside the top pan and lit. Once the fire roared, a massive aluminium lid was placed over it, trapping the heat and simmering the cakes below without extinguishing the flame.
II. The coarse beauty of the mooncake
“Eat. Everything but the iron pot is my own.”
I was visiting the village as a documentary director. At the time, my credentials as a foodie were still modest, and like many of my urban peers, I was watching my weight. So, when she offered the mooncake with such generous enthusiasm, I didn’t take the whole thing, but delicately broke off a tiny piece with two fingers.
As soon as it hit my tongue, I regretted it. This was unlike any mooncake, or indeed any pastry, I had ever tasted.
This mooncake was not ‘delicious’ in the conventional sense. It wasn’t refined or smooth, and it lacked the fancy, modern fillings—all things that would usually be considered flaws. It was somewhat like a traditional savory cracker, but less oily, softer, and not crisp. Yet, as I ate, I could almost taste the distinct character and the imperfections of every single ingredient; perhaps it was because the village mill didn’t grind the flour quite so fine, leaving it with a certain coarseness.
That was it! That grainy texture was exactly what I remembered. She hadn’t used snow-white flour; it had a faint hint of brown and a rustic texture. I realise now that this unbleached, additive-free flour possesses its own kind of sophisticated coarseness.
Of course, the light brown, filling-less mooncake gave me more than just a sensory shock. This cake, where “everything but the iron pot was my own”, gave me—someone who had never touched the soil or farmed—a genuine feeling of the relationship between humans and the land. It spoke of the seasonality of food: wheat sown in autumn and harvested in spring alongside rapeseed; the fields then flooded for rice seedlings, which are sown in spring and harvested in autumn. After a year of toil, the autumn harvest is the perfect time to boil maltose and make mooncakes.
III. Flower mooncakes from Erren Valley
The heart of homemade mooncakes is the filling. This year I’ve made rose and gardenia, which could also be called flower cakes—though they must not be confused with those ‘internet-famous’ souvenir cakes; these are a different breed entirely.
I once made these with some friends in Erren Valley. They kneaded the dough themselves, and although the crusts generally broke and didn’t look much to boast about, the taste was heavenly. They all said that the flower cakes they’d had before were a disappointment, wondering if the filling actually contained real roses or just rose-flavoured essence.
Roses are prone to so many pests that simply surviving is a feat. I have planted over a hundred edible roses in Erren Valley, mainly Dark Red and Yunnan Red, but the numbers have dwindled. Now only a dozen or so remain; every surviving bloom is precious and rare. It takes a whole year of gathering from my garden to make just a dozen flower cakes.
On that particular day, I didn’t have much rose jam, so the filling was a sugar-preserved gardenia jam mixed with a bit of pre-toasted whole wheat flour. The gardenia jam used for just a few dozen flower cakes required several full basins of petals. As my friends worked, one of them did the maths: “Given my consumption of flowers, I doubt all the roses in China could sustain the sales of these flower cakes for even a single week.”
Roses are difficult to grow, but gardenias are hardy. I have carved out a dedicated gardenia area on the slopes on both sides of the stream behind my house; the west side is for large double-petalled blooms, and the east for small double-petalled ones. Every tree and every branch was started by my own hand, from transplanting to grafting. After several years of careful tending, there will eventually be slopes on both sides blanketed in gardenias. This year, I expanded my honeybees to six hives; when the gardenias bloom in abundance, I can make honey-glazed gardenia jam.
Yet, achieving that state of ‘everything but the iron pot being my own’ remains a challenge: two months of unrelenting rain meant this spring’s wheat crop failed completely, and while the peanut harvest was just enough to sustain us, it wasn’t sufficient for pressing oil.
But like the farmers of Chezhou Village, through slow cultivation and patient gathering, there will come a day of the full moon when I shall use my own flour, oil, and honeyed flower jam. Lighting the firewood I felled myself and using a kiln I built with my own hands, I will bake a batch of honey gardenia cakes—for myself, for the land, and for the season.
