Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Celebrate with a mooncake on trail

As I walked around an Asian grocery store recently, I passed a table full of mooncakes. As I reminisced about eating them as a kid, I also thought about how awesome a hiking or backpacking treat they would be. 

Seeing them at the store reminded me of the Mid-Autumn Festival get-togethers I went to when I was young, where my small Chinese community would come together in Bellingham and we would share music, conversation, joy and mooncakes. Each kid would probably get something like one-eighth of a big mooncake (if that) because of how rich and dense they are. 

Mooncakes are a celebratory food in the fall for several Asian cultures... and could also be a sweet hiking treat! Photo by Tiffany Chou.

Mooncakes are the signature treat eaten at the Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, which takes place in early fall each year. (It’s on Oct. 6 this year.) It’s a lunar holiday celebrated by several Asian cultures on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, when the full moon is said to be particularly bright. Different cultures have created variations of the cakes, so they differ in their texture, ingredients and appearance. In general, the cakes are pastries filled with various things, including lotus paste, red bean and egg yolk. 

The ones I ate as a kid were the traditional Chinese, Cantonese-style ones: shiny, baked-to-perfection treats with a tasty, paste filling in the center, and a beautiful, intricate design on top.

Many mooncakes have lovely, complex designs on top of them. Photo by Tiffany Chou. 

The memories — celebrating with my community, eating mooncakes — are very precious to me, especially as I have moved away from my hometown and that community. 

When I saw the mooncakes at the store and thought back to those celebrations, I remembered just how dense those mooncakes were. A single large mooncake can easily be somewhere around 1,000 calories, and small ones are more portable but just as dense. If calorie-to-weight or calorie-to-volume ratios are things you think about regularly, you may have been sleeping on mooncakes. Plus, they can be pretty tasty, especially if you want something fatty and carb-heavy on trail. 

So, as you’re planning your hike this week, if you come across a mooncake at the store (or look up a recipe for a fun indoor activity!), consider tossing one in your pack to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival on trail — and to fuel you along the way.