Ieyasu moon cake of Hotel Crown Palais

Last Friday, we had a moon viewing event and ate tsukimidango or moon viewing dumplings. This event came from China, where it is called the Mid-Autumn Festival and celebrated on a larger scale than in Japan. Instead of tsukimidango, they have a variety kinds of moon cakes. They are called yuebing in Chinese. In Japan, we call them geppei, and they are available all year round in some shops, especially those in China Towns in Japan.

Entetsu Department Store has now Yokohama China Town Food Fair in the basement. They are selling various Chinese sweets. I like moon cakes filled with rich paste with many ingredients, but there seems to be no vegan ones available in the fair. All of them contain egg.

In the basement, there is a permanent Chinese delicatessen Houou (鳳凰). Their foods are prepared in a Chinese restaurant Houou in Hotel Crown Palaise near JR Hamamatsu Station.

Though their dishes are not for vegetarians and vegans, Houo has very special sweets: vegan moon cakes! When I checked the ingredients, I could hardly believe that they didn’t contain egg, daily products, or lard. When I asked the clerk about that, she kindly called the restaurant to confirm that they were animal-free.  

There were two kinds them. According to some websites, they were first made in 2015 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the lord of Hamamatsu Castle I introduced yesterday. One of the moon cakes bore his name “家康 (Ieyasu)” on the surface and the other his family crest. I bought the one with his name.

It contained many ingredients: white bean paste (white beans, great northern beans, baby lima beans), wheat flour, sugar, red bean paste (Tianjin red beans, kidney beans, rice beans, red kidney beans), lotus seeds, dates, soybean oil, lonicera sake, glutinous rice flower, starch, lemon, lye water, and beaching agent (sulfite). Even for bean paste, multiple kinds of beans were mixed. The skin contained lonicera sake that Ieyasu loved to drink.

The inside looked like this. There were layers of two kinds of bean paste.

The moon cake was very sweet. But the two kinds of bean paste still tasted differently from Japanese adzuki paste I’m used to. I have no words to explain it, but I like this moon cake very much. Many different ingredients create richness of the taste.