Behold! The most creative mooncakes of 2021

Each year brings new variations on the classic mooncake. Snowskin options get ever more novel – chocolate and black garlic (!), white rabbit and cranberry, Hibiki-soaked yuzu peel are just a few newfangled flavours that have made it to market this year.

But if you’re truly in the mood for something especially different, there is a host of interesting options that, if nothing else, will fuel a conversation as you sit around a table and sip your mid-autumn tea.

Here are a few:

3D Big Three Scholars Mahjong Mooncakes

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Since they are shaped like mah-jong tiles, they can’t really be considered mooncakes, can they? Whatever the case, these snowskin confections from Ah Kiat Frozen Food come in a set of 16 pieces ($26), with a mixture of five flavours: honeydew, sweet potato, red bean, green tea and pandan bean paste.

Chicky Duo from Goodwood Park Hotel

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Also created for the mid-autumn festival, these pairs of buttery pastry chicks ($13.80) are filled with white lotus paste that enrobe a morsel of golden salted egg yolk.

Which came first: The chick or the egg? It’s a question for the ages, but we do know that we had to bite into the chick before we got to that deliciously more-ish salted egg yolk!

Godiva’s luxurious mooncake collection

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It’s a perennial question for chocolate lovers: Why eat mooncakes when you can eat chocolate? To solve that quandary, check out Belgian chocolatier Godiva’s “mooncake collection”, which are really chocolate entremets pretending to be mooncakes.

There’s a black truffle apricot milk chocolate number featuring milk chocolate and truffle ganache offset by the brightness of apricot pate de fruit.

We also find ourselves drawn to the lychee oolong white chocolate mooncake with oolong tea and white chocolate ganache, lychee pate de fruit and crepe dentelle (a fine wafer). Godiva’s mooncakes are available in boxes of four ($62), eight ($75) or 10 ($102).

Moon tarts by Paul

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Not a fan of snowskin or mooncakes in general? No worries. Mid-Autumn can be another excuse to indulge in exquisitely made sweets. In this case, French bakery Paul has created moon tarts, which come in a box of eight ($48) entremets (French layered desserts).

Each contains a pair of Mango Passion (mango and passionfruit mousse on a chocolate tart crust), Berry More (raspberry mousse, yoghurt crunch, lychee jam and almond cream in a chocolate tart shell), Cheese Adzuki Dome (cream cheese mousse, red bean paste, almond cream and blueberry glaze), and Caramel Chocolate Fantasy (chocolate caramel, chocolate mousse, salted caramel crunch, and caramel hazelnuts).

World’s first Harry Potter mooncakes

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Harry Potter fans will rejoice at the world’s first Harry Potter mooncakes made by homegrown bakery Awfully Chocolate in conjunction with Warner Bros (in other words, don’t call the copyright police because the bakery is licensed to make these confections).

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Housed in a gilded red velvet chest ($128), the mooncakes bear the emblem of each Hogwarts house. Gryffindor is repped by a red yam lotus single yolk mooncake, while Hufflepuff gets a pumpkin white lotus with double yolk.

Ravenclaw is symbolised in a lovely blue pea pu-er lotus with melon seeds mooncake while Slytherin comes in matcha black sesame with black and white sesame seeds.

If you’re a hardcore fan, there’s a Harry Potter Collector’s Edition Chest ($168), which comes with a matching set of collectible Hogwarts house ceramic plates.

This article was first published in Wonderwall.sg.