Mooncakes to try and buy in London, America and worldwide

Mooncakes in Singapore and Asia
I ate mooncakes in Singapore. (Cheaper in Taiwan, I was told.) The last time I tried them was at a meeting of the Bukit Batok Toastmasters Club at the Bukit Batok Community Club near Bukit Batok MRT station. The Sergeant at Arms asked everybody in the room to tell their best memories of eating moon cakes and celebrating the mid-autumn festival. The festival is celebrated in China, Hong Kong, Korea and Vietnam. Also look for mooncakes in Macau.

Lanterns
I had thought that the lanterns lit by candles were a danger and I was right. One member told us how he and his childhood friends had carefully carried lanterns but a gust of wind blew and as usual the lanterns caught fire. On this occasion the lanterns accidentally set fire to trees, "Fortunately in ht neighbour's garden - not ours!"

Nostalgically, the speakers regretted that nowadays lanterns are often lit by electronic lights. (From a health and safety point of view the modern method sounds much safer.)

Another speaker recalled how in the Sixties in Vietnam you often had power outages. The whole city neighbourhood was in darkness. Not only no lights in your own house and garden. No nearby skyscrapers, nor streets lights - unlike modern Singapore. So you had a spooky or romantic or olde worlde atmosphere. You could clearly see the large moon which the festival celebrates.

Get Together
The festival also causes the coming together of families. Like Christian and worldwide Christmas Day and the Jewish Passover or Seder Night, the festival means shared food, singing of traditional songs and reunion of families.

The Toastmasters Club had a mid-meeting interval where we had a chance to try both a sliver of the traditional baked mooncake and the colourful snow skin mooncake. We took a vote on which was preferred and the vote was almost equally divided.

England and America
I was thinking about where I could get mooncakes in London and the American continent and thought of all the Chinese restaurants worldwide and the Chinese restaurants in Chinese areas of London and Manchester in England, New York and West Coast America, and Vancouver in Canada.

Today I looked online for mooncakes in London and the USA. TripAdvisor told me that a visitor to London found the London prices four times the price in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

Mooncakes Worldwide
Where can you buy mooncakes worldwide?
In Alphabetical order: China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, England.

Mooncakes in the USA
See and buy online in season in the USA from Kee Wah bakery in Los Angeles, California, USA:
https://www.keewah.us
Worldwide orders from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Kee-Wah-Bakery-White-Mooncake/dp/B005F7LXHM
http://www.chinatownology.com/mid_autumn_festival.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooncake
For more information and pictures of mooncakes, see my previous posts on mooncakes.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.