The Mid-Autumn Festival is upon us, and that can only mean one thing — mooncakes are going to be a constant in our diets for the next month or so.
As usual, you can count on all the bakeries, Chinese restaurants and hotel chains to release their usual fare, but the one that’s caught our attention this year are the Oreo branded mooncakes.
Yup, you heard us right — everyone’s favourite cookie brand has released a set of six “Wonderfilled” mooncakes, with flavours ranging from Brownie Chocolate to Custard & Pineapple Flavoured Jam.
Trust us, we’re just as curious as you, and since eating is…well, kind of our job, we decided to get a box for ourselves to see how they taste.
Brownie Chocolate
This was hands-down the most popular choice in the office, probably because it looks like an Oreo cookie in mooncake form.
The taste, however, is a whole other situation altogether.
As its name suggests, the Brownie Chocolate mooncake is primarily filled with a chocolate flavoured paste — the kind you usually find in mooncakes, just chocolate flavoured — along with a hint of the more traditional lotus seed paste in the center.
While a chocolate mooncake might sound good on paper (to us, at least), the combination of flavours don’t exactly go well together, with the distinct flavours of both jockeying for position in your mouth. The result is a taste that’s not strong on either front, ultimately resulting in a rather underwhelming taste.
Double Chocolate With Milk
If you’ve ever eaten those White Rabbit candies before (really, who hasn’t?), then the taste of the Double Chocolate With Milk mooncake is going to be very familiar to you. The taste of the skin starts off rather mild, but after a few seconds a strong, milky flavour creeps up on you.
The rest of the mooncake is pretty much an inverse of the Brownie Chocolate, with a lotus seed paste filling surrounding a chocolate centre. It’s supposedly double the chocolate, but we really couldn’t tell the difference, to be honest.
With more lotus seed paste in this one, however, the flavours are spread out a little more evenly, and when paired with the milk skin everything comes together pretty nicely to produce just the right amount of sweet and savoury.
Strawberry Jam
Unlike the previous two in this list, the strawberry Jam mooncake has a jelly-esque center that forms the center of its taste as well.
Considering that everything from the skin to the main filling is strawberry flavoured, however, everything is just slightly different variations of the same thing, and despite that there still isn’t much of a kick to it.
We’re thinking that strawberry just doesn’t work well as a mooncake flavour, and it might have been *slightly* better if they had used snow skin instead.
For what it is, though, we’ll pass.
Custard & Pineapple Flavoured Jam
Just like the Strawberry Jam before it, the taste of the Custard & Pineapple Flavoured Jam mooncake is dominated by it’s jelly filling, and more than one person in the office compared it to a pineapple tart.
As we’d come to expect by this point, however, its flavour wasn’t particularly strong, and you’d probably be better off eating an actual pineapple tart.
The custard flavoured skin does adds a rather unique, buttery taste, and if we had to pick a favourite out of the four it’d probably be this one.
Final Thoughts
If these mooncakes didn’t have the Oreo branding stamped onto their faces, we really wouldn’t have known that they belonged to the cookie company.
We really wish that Oreo’s attempt at mooncakes would’ve tasted…well, a little more Oreo-y (putting their signature cream inside, perhaps?), instead of playing it safe with a standard that you could probably find at your neighbourhood bakery.
If you’re ready to give in to the gimmick and still want to try these out for yourself, they’re available right now at select FairPrice outlets for $29.90, or $26.90 if you order online from their website.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you, though.
Also Read 5 Must Order Dishes At Hougang’s Hainanese Village For $4 And Under
(Header Image Credit: Discover SG)
