I don’t like mooncakes. I’ve never eaten more than those toothpick samples they give out at supermarkets. They’re intensely sweet, like eating a teaspoon of syrup, and have a distasteful lardy aftertaste. One provides enough energy to last a day, and two with sufficient cholestrol to make sure you don’t make it to the next Lantern festival. But that’s what I speculate, I’ve never ventured far enough to know.

There are some exceptions to this common phenomenon we call a mooncake. The two most cited are the Haagen Dazs ice cream mooncakes and the Peninsula custard mooncake.

But how is a surreptitiously molded piece of ice cream, covered in chocolate, anything close to a mooncake? In fact, how is it anything other than what it is, a piece of chocolate covered ice cream, with a mango sorbet as a filling in some cases? I understand many non-traditional forms of mooncakes exist, with fillings ranging from ham to tiramisu, but many a time they’ve managed to incorporate traditional elements – such as a flaky crust or even the modernly accepted “snow-skin” crust. But one common theme they’ve retained is a sense of price v product. A box of four Haagen Dazs “mooncakes” costs HK$209, at discount. You could get 1 tub of ice cream per “mooncake” at that price. Tub, please.

The Peninsular mooncake, on the other hand, is quite lovely indeed. It is small and bite-sized, but appropiately so with a solidified custard filling – any larger and it would be overkill. It has a deliciously aromatic, slightly salty smell, and the innards tastes like the condensed brother of the ??? (steamed bun with milk custard filling) . A box of 8 costs HK$198, which I thought was ridiculously expensive until I incurred the Haagen Dazs version. Still, the hotel’s mooncakes sell out early every year. They also donate HK$10 to charity for every box they sell, which is a nice and thoughtful advertising gesture – certainly better than nothing at all.