Mooncakes
Gonna be putting a lot of things in molds now.
Ingredients:
Salted duck eggs
Lotus seeds
1 shop vac
1 pair child-sized eclipse glasses
-1 Driver’s license
-1 Bank account
-1 glass in the door of your car
Instructions:
1. Be alive during a total solar eclipse and live in the PATH OF TOTALITY.
2. Since you don’t like moon pies, access the xianxia hole you’re still climbing out of and choose mooncakes to mark the occasion.
Note: Mooncakes are traditionally for mid-autumn festival, but there are no rules during the eclipse. Day is night. Time is a construct.
3. Acquire mooncake mold with fun interchangeable designs and begin search for ingredients not stocked at your local grocery store: lye water, lotus seeds, golden syrup, and salted duck eggs.
4. Discover two Asian groceries near you, across the street from each other, one for Burmese cuisine and one for Myanmar cuisine. By your understanding, these are the same country. What does this mean? Who should you support? What would you be saying by going to one or the other?
Are they rivals? Are they one store that moved?
5. Chicken out and go to the big Chinese grocery further away.
You found them!
6. With ingredients acquired and ready for the big day, go visit your family for Easter. Understand that you are cutting it close since making the mooncakes will take three days, but you plan to be back almost a week before the eclipse, so your biggest worry should be potential Eclipse Day traffic along the PATH OF TOTALTY.
7. Get your car busted into and your purse stolen.
If you skip this step you’re not a committed baker.
8. In order to drive back to your mooncake ingredients, you will need new glass, ID, and a bank account for gas money.
a. Attempt to replace the glass in your car door. Be told the new glass doesn’t fit in your car and you have to wait for more glass to arrive from the factory in ten days. The eclipse is in seven days.
b. Attempt to replace your bank account because your purse had checks in it. Be told you need two forms of ID. Your ID was stolen.
c. Attempt to replace your ID. To replace ID, you will need more ID, which was stolen.
9. At this point, Eclipse Day is upon you. Luckily, your family also lives in the PATH OF TOTALITY. Substitute cosmic brownies for mooncakes and watch a miracle of nature through child-sized eclipse glasses because they make those bigger for reckless child eyes, so they’re better at covering glasses. Be very zen about the whole thing.
They’re not bad. (But they’re not mooncakes.)
10. Lose all memory of how you got replacement ID sent to you, but feel confident that Fugue State You figured it out. Present ID to bank and receive an account and the conversational equivalent of a pat on the head.
11. Attend Glass Appointment II: The Reckoning. For this step, you will need an undiagnosed anxiety disorder and a baby face (or substitute whatever normally makes people feel sorry for you. Have fun with it!).
a. Be told that the new glass also doesn’t fit and they will need to order some more from a different factory.
b. Have a tiny panic attack and put your head between your knees until the car worker guy leaves to get his boss.
c. Listen despondently to the boss. Hear him say, “Let me try something,” and then watch him drive away.
d. When the boss returns from his mystery errand, he will have glass that fits in your car. Ask no questions.
12. Three weeks into your five-day trip, go the fuck home.
13. After sufficient catch-up and recovery time (have fun with it!) make mooncakes to honor the memory of the eclipse. This is a three-day process. Look ahead to time their completion to the day you’re going to the Renaissance fair so you can make your friends eat them in the car.
14. Day One: soak dried lotus seeds overnight.
Good job.
15. Day Two: this is the long day. Have an audiobook cued up.
a. Make lotus seed paste. You have never seen this substance, so base it on the written description in your recipe and vibes. Get anxious when the simmering lotus seeds smell like a public bathroom.
Get the green bits out. This takes longer than expected.
Would you say that’s pulling away from the pan?
b. Make the dough and refrigerate everything appropriately. To get the timing right, read the instructions so many times you memorize them and still second guess yourself and read them twice before each step.
c. The fun part: roll things into balls. Flatten balls into disks. Roll them back into balls, but with duck eggs inside.
You’re a kitchen scale savant.
d. The other fun part: use the mooncake mold. This goes surprisingly smoothly.
They’re so cool!
16. Your recipe says it will make eight mooncakes without duck eggs or ten mooncakes with duck eggs. Make half with and half without, which logically comes to twelve mooncakes.
The shell tastes similar to a fortune cookie.
The duck egg is the moon inside!
17. Be surprised when you like these a lot. They do not taste like a public bathroom. You even prefer the ones with a salted duck egg inside.
18. Day Three: refrigerate overnight. Make your friends eat them in the morning when they pick you up for the Ren fair. Tell them they don’t have to eat them (but they actually do have to eat them). Make sure they appreciate that the mooncakes are for the eclipse that happened a month ago. Worth it, honestly.
