Chocolate mooncakes with Koko Black this mid-Autumn festival
Koko Black’s Mid Autumn Mooncakes
The moon has always known how to throw a party. She does not need invitations or RSVPs, only the pull of tides and the hush of autumn air. On the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when she is at her roundest and most luminous, she hosts her greatest celebration, the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is an evening heavy with lantern light and myth, an evening for lovers and families alike, when stories rise with the scent of tea and mooncakes are broken open like secrets.
The mid-Autumn festival story
Once, long ago, Hou Yi shot down nine excess suns and was rewarded with an elixir of immortality. Once, his wife Chang’e swallowed that elixir to keep it from greedy hands, and floated away, feather-light, until she could do nothing but settle into the embrace of the moon. There she waits still, pale and eternal, accompanied by the Jade Rabbit who pounds his pestle, making immortality’s medicine in an endless rhythm that keeps time with the beating of the human heart. These stories are woven into every Mid-Autumn Festival like silk threads, impossible to unpick, glimmering no matter how many centuries pass.
Koko Black is the alchemist of Australian chocolate
I confess, I have always adored the festival but never the traditional mooncake. The salted yolk gleaming within its dense pastry has always struck me as a relic, worthy of reverence, but not of desire. And so when Koko Black, that alchemist of Australian chocolate, invited me to taste their mooncakes, that is mooncakes reimagined, mooncakes dreamed anew in ganache and praline, it was as though the goddess herself had slipped me a second, sweeter elixir.
Mango Five Spice mooncake
The Mango Five Spice mooncake is a golden hymn. Imagine a caravan crossing desert sands, cinnamon and star anise jostling with cloves in their sacks, while a mango tree waits at the edge of a jungle to surrender its honeyed fruit. Inside its shell of 54% dark chocolate, Koko Black has hidden a creamy ganache, warm with Chinese five spice, and at its heart, a yolk of mango jelly as bright as a harvest sun. It is a story of spice routes and silk roads, of sweetness discovered at the end of long journeys. To eat it is to feel both grounded and transported, earth and sky, spice and fruit, all at once.
Matcha Red Bean mooncake
Then there is the Matcha Red Bean mooncake, which tastes like a garden captured at dawn. The white chocolate has been greened with matcha, that bitter-smooth tea leaf, while inside lies a red bean ganache, earthy, savoury, resonant as temple bells, anchored by a matcha shortbread biscuit that crumbles like the first step onto moss. It is a mooncake for those who long for stillness, for those who know that sweetness can be quiet as well as loud, for those who would rather sit beneath a willow tree and sip tea than set off firecrackers.
Crispy Almond Caramel mooncake
The Crispy Almond Caramel mooncake is an unrepentant revel. It is the laughter in the feast, the cousin telling a scandalous story by lantern light. The milk chocolate shell yields to a velvet-smooth vanilla caramel, which is then interrupted gloriously, rudely, like a cymbal crash by a layer of crunchy almond praline. It is sweet and nutty and sticky and loud, the kind of flavour that makes you laugh with your mouth full. If Mango Five Spice is the caravan, if Matcha Red Bean is the garden, then Crispy Almond Caramel is the festival itself, fire-lit, bustling, crackling with joy.
Cherry Pistachio mooncake
And finally, my undoing, the Cherry Pistachio mooncake. I did not expect to love it so much. I did not expect it to ambush me with longing. But here it is, sour cherry jelly, sharp as heartbreak and bright as rubies, pressed against a crunchy pistachio praline that tastes like green velvet, all encased in caramelised white chocolate that holds it together like an embrace you don’t want to end. It is sweet and tart and nutty all at once, like every love story worth telling, contradiction made delicious. If Chang’e herself were offered one of these before floating skyward, I suspect she might have chosen exile anyway, so she could eat them under the endless moon.
Koko Black’s mooncakes are constellations you can hold in your hand, offerings to the moon and to the idea of gathering itself. They shimmer with centuries of meaning, yet they taste entirely of now, contemporary, daring, exquisite. Each one is a miniature celebration, a story with layers you peel back on your tongue, a reminder that food is never just sustenance but memory, ritual, and art.
So this Mid-Autumn Festival, when the moon swells round and luminous above us, I will light a lantern, pour tea, and lift one of these chocolate mooncakes to my lips. In that moment, I will not only taste cherry and pistachio, spice and caramel, but the ghost of an emperor’s feast, the whisper of Chang’e’s sorrow, the warmth of family laughter. And I will think, the moon has always known how to throw a party. But sometimes, she lets Koko Black cater.
Available in an 8pc gift box for $109.90, 4pc gift box for $59.90 and individually for $12.90, Koko Black’s reinvented mooncakes will be available from 8 September until the Mid-Autumn Festival, 6 October.
Visit www.kokoblack.com
