Bored of mooncakes? Try the 'mooncaron'
Hong Kong-based chef gives the mooncake a French spin
Forget snow skin mooncakes, ice cream mooncakes and every-flavour-under-the-sun mooncakes.
The latest in mooncake fashion is the 'mooncaron'.
While the - admittedly awkward - name suggests the dessert is a mooncake-macaron combination, this latest Hong Kong incarnation is actually a combination of a macaron with a canele, put together to look like a mooncake.
It is the creation of Frenchman Louis-Antoine Giroud,the chief executive and head chef at IPC Foodlab in Hong Kong.
The mooncarons were introduced in July, and feature French ingredients and uses only natural sugars, according to dbc.hk.
It comes in six flavours: Strawberry, lemon, chocolate, toffee, vanilla, and pistachio.
A post introducing the dish stressed that they were not intending "to replace the long history of the Chinese traditional mooncakes".
According to South China Morning Post, Giroud came up with the concept in a day, but spent some time perfecting the recipe.
He believes "people are understandably bored with having the same thing year after year".
His mooncaron, he wrote on his website, is a "new kind of mooncake as a bridge between East and West".
The mooncarons sell for HK$388 (S$71) for a box of six, or HK$588 for a box of twelve.
If you're in Hong Kong, order them here.
OTHER MOONCARONS
Sorry to tell you this, Giroud, but you're not the first to try your hand at a mooncaron.
Others have tried, sticking closer to the origins of the name and making mooncake-flavoured macarons.
Here's a mooncaron with lotus paste and salted egg filling from cafe and bakery H&CO Gourmand in Jakarta (they made theirs about two years ago):
And around this time last year, Hong Kong-based Instagram user @wooaaron was baking up his own version of the mooncaron, also with lotus seed paste and salted egg:
He seems to have whipped them up again recently.
So, what do you think of the mooncaron? Is this the best, or weirdest, adaptation of the much-loved mooncake? Tell us in the comments!
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