The other day was mooncake festival day, the most important day of the autumn festival that for some reason doesn’t start until next week. So everyone buys tons of these little stuffed pastries and they give them away to friends, business partners and family. Disclosure: I have never actually eaten a mooncake (update: I tried a Korean one today, and it tasted almost as good as a wet piece of styrofoam), but have it upon good authority that they taste like the fecal matter of death himself.

Funny thing is, most people don’t actually eat them, just the act of giving them is part of the tradition. In fact once upon a time some enterprising individuals repacked some old mooncakes from previous years and sold them anew. They would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for some meddling foreigners who happened to eat them only to later to be found dried and curled up in the fetal position off Hong Kong Road. Moral of the story, if Chinese people don’t eat it, neither should you. A good idea would be to bake some of your own fake mooncakes and carry them around with you this time of the year, and when you’ve found yourself in a situation where people are expecting you to eat pull the old switcheroo.

So today being the mooncake festival, I’ve decided to combine two important chinese traditions, fireworks and mooncakes. Unfortunately, I don’t have any fireworks, so my microwave will have to suffice. You’ll notice that there are two Chinese characters formed into the top. They roughly translate to “xiang chun” which in your English equates to a surgeons general’s warning about cancer and other ailments. What begins as an attractive looking hockey puck slowly transforms after being bombarded by the nuclear rays of my high powered microwave. After 5 minutes of a internal searing, the little plastic dish the cake came in has melted flat and there’s plume of smoke billowing out of a rupture in the center. My apartment now smells of vaporized ass death. Here are some pics.

Some would say I have to much time on my hands. I would disagree, in fact I don’t have nearly enough time to conduct all the microwave-pastry experiments I have lined up. You can’t argue with science, or ironically, death.

The greatest thing about this whole mooncake worshipping deal is that no one is around, the city I’m in is as dead the body in my freezer. I assume all the Chinese people have gone out to the country to some big pit for a ritualistic mooncake burial.

Another interesting yet pointless fact: I wrote this entire post on my cellphone while waiting for my steak and noodles in a deserted restaurant. Also I made the whole thing up, except for the part about me traveling back in time and saving all the puppies from the Titanic. Oh, and that 50 cent mooncake really did get incinerated.

Filed under: things i ate