The Chinese delicacy is available only for a short time each year, when the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival comes round - that's on October 6 this year.

Recent festivals have produced some wacky ideas - Haagen-Dazs tantalises the young at heart with its ice-cream mooncakes, replacing the customary egg yolk filling with mango sherbet.

The big innovation this year is Baan Gor Pai's tom yum kung mooncake - all the familiar spices of your favourite soup packed into a medium-sized cake. It may well fall into the love-it-or-hate-it category.

Green tea- and coffee-flavoured mooncakes were big hits last year, and "snow" mooncakes garnered a lot of interest.

Youthful tastebuds may drool, but Chinese chefs who abide by tradition say these modern mooncakes are just gimmicks, and they won't last.

"Food and fashion are alike - it depends of your taste," says Kwok Fung Tam of the Peninsula Bangkok's Mei Jiang Cantonese restaurant. "One person's favourite is unbearable to another person."

Chef Kwok notes that, even in Hong Kong where he was born and raised, new flavours appear every year - spirulina algae, coffee - and young people are always eager to try them.

"But there is always the strong demand for traditional mooncakes, simply because this is a traditional festival."

Patcharee Kesornthamkittiwut, who grew up among Chinese immigrants in Bangkok's Bang Rak neighbourhood and handles China operations for the Shangri-La Hotel, laments that the festival was more meaningful when she was young.

"The whole family gathered in the evening, everyone dressed beautifully. The balcony of every house was decorated with colourful lanterns in different shapes, and with flowers and sugarcane. Mooncakes and cosmetics were offered in worship to the goddess."

It's a rare scene now in Bangkok, though Patcharee says you might find lingering glimpses along Yaowarat Road in Chinatown on the night of the festival.

Mooncakes, Chef Kwok explains, have been made for thousands of years with fillings of red and green beans and a lotus seed paste.

Cooking at the hotel since 1998 and now the executive Chinese chef, Kwok and his 15 assistants nevertheless spend the month preceding the festival making mini-mooncakes with a custard filling, a Peninsula Hong Kong secret recipe for 20 years.

"Young people won't stick to one flavour," he says. "Their tastes change all the time. But older people, even though they might try new things, long for the traditional stuff."

Sakkarin Karsorn, the dim sum chef at the Shangri-La's Shang Palace restaurant, worries that the new fillings he creates won't sell as well as the Shang's most popular mooncakes - the ones filled with a mixture of five nuts and the star mooncakes.

"Chocolate and coffee mooncakes are made for young people and Westerners. The creators want to make a wave - not money. But people wanting to buy mooncakes for their ancestors have to have the original fillings."

The Shangri-La Hotel sticks to that tradition - red bean paste, lotus seed, durian and the best-selling five-nut varieties.

At the Oriental Bangkok it's the same story, creativity taking a back seat to flavour, hygiene and freshness. When the hotel started making mooncakes 12 years ago, it sold about 200 pieces a day. Now it sells up to 4,000.

Chef Chaiko Wonginyou says the most distinguished filling is custard cream, which is moderately sweet and fragrant with coconut milk.

Juthamas Cholthavornpong

The Nation