Mid-Autumn Festival 2023: The best coconut mooncakes to go nuts over
Coconut is the ingredient du jour this Mid-Autumn Festival. Here are 8 spots for exquisite coconut mooncakes.
By Alvin Lim /
Every year, hotels and restaurants around Singapore compete to usher in mooncake season with elevated takes on a festive classic, changing up its tried-and-true flavours with ingredients both adventurous and innovative.
This Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on September 29 this year, has seen the rise of one star ingredient above all else — whether by culinary collusion or sheer coincidence: Coconut, a sweet, creamy fruit recently enjoying its time in the sun thanks to the proliferation of thirst-quenching coconut shakes. Yes, coconut shakes are the second most ordered item behind burgers on delivery app Grab, according to its Food and Grocery Trends report for 2022.
No wonder the tropical treat — long a key ingredient in many local desserts — has made its way onto, and into, mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Here are nine spots to get coconut mooncakes in Singapore.
Related: Mooncake Trends 2022: The Best Tea-infused Mooncakes To Savour
Celebrate the longstanding traditions of Mid-Autumn Festival with a grand dame of Singapore’s hotel industry, now presenting a novel take on a classic Teochew-style mooncake. Enter the Yam & Coconut Rum Truffle Snowskin Mooncake, a pastel-hued number comprising a luscious coconut and white chocolate truffle infused with rum, swathed in housemade yam paste, then delicate snowskin.
Get this and other mooncake selections from the heritage hotel in a cream-pearl box adorned with an illustration of Raffles Hotel’s iconic facade.
Find out more here.
Shangri-La Singapore presents a hat trick of coconut mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival 2023. The first two are a pair of Shanghai mooncakes, made different from the traditional baked flavour by a buttery shortcrust shell. One flavour offers textural surprise by way of coconut flakes tucked in the centre of pandan-infused white lotus paste, further encased in a pandan shortcrust pastry — a distinctly familiar pairing that’s bound to please.
For a subtler expression of coconutty luxuriance, sample the Plant-based Shanghai Mooncake. It features white lotus paste and mung bean cradled by shortcrust pastry made rich and crumbly with ‘butter’ hewn from organic, cold-pressed extra virgin coconut oil. The result is a mooncake harmoniously balanced in flavour and texture while remaining inclusive for friends and family on a plant-based diet.
Those more partial to traditional baked mooncakes can find a hat trick in the hotel’s new baked mooncake flavour, featuring a yam and black sesame filling studded with shredded coconut.
Find out more here.
Related: The best modern Chinese restaurants for family meals
Prepare to feast on a quartet of intriguing new snowskin mooncakes from Pan Pacific Singapore’s Hai Tien Lo. Expect fruity, tea-forward flavours like an orange paste and matcha ganache number and a throwback to childhood sweets in the Yam Paste White Rabbit Candy Ganache Mooncake.
There’s also a snowskin mooncake and a seeming homage to local kueh, featuring gula melaka-laden lotus paste and desiccated coconut.
Find out more here.
JW Marriot Hotel Singapore divides its mooncake offerings into yin-and-yang collections that cater to traditionalists and snowskin mooncake fans alike. Both offer the flavours of coconut in different ways.
The traditional baked mooncake selection, delivered in a gilded box dedicated to the Mooncake Festival in the year of the Rabbit, features a mooncake stuffed with yam paste and a locavore mix of gula melaka and coconutty kaya, while its snowskin-focused cousin — burgundy, with motifs of flowers and birds — comes with a coconut truffle ensconced in purple potato lotus paste.
Find out more here.
On offer at Michelin-starred Summer Palace in Conrad Singapore Orchard is a mooncake collection spanning both traditional baked treats and mini snowskin mooncakes. The latter offering features an exquisite octet boasting a medley of flavours that range from the conventional and ever-popular — Mao Shan Wang durian, anyone? — to the experimental, including, of course, an adventurous, indulgent pairing of coconut chocolate and black glutinous rice.
Find out more here.
Related: 5 of the best amuse bouche at Singapore’s top fine-dining restaurants
PS.Cafe unveils its inaugural mooncake collection, featuring four exquisite baked mooncakes that draw from the stalwart cafe chain’s iconic dishes and history in Singapore. The latter presents in the Verandah mooncake, consisting of pandan paste blended with fresh coconuts around an indulgent salted egg yolk.
The former can be found in the White Truffle and Sticky Date, both baked tributes to the brand’s signature truffle oil — which is mixed with white lotus paste — and Sticky Date Pudding dessert, by way of honeyed dates and brown sugar mochi mixed with date paste, respectively.
Find out more here.
Heritage restaurant The Clifford Pier at The Fullerton Hotel Singapore celebrates its 90th birthday and Mid-Autumn Festival in one fell swoop with four commemorative mooncakes hidden in a bespoke tiffin carrier. Beneath the tingkat’s orchid and butterfly-adorned exterior lie baked mooncakes that nod to Singapore’s diverse hawker culture.
Homages include a satay peanut sauce number with mixed nuts, a savoury baked treat tinged with hae bee hiam (spicy dried shrimp) and, of course, a mooncake that models after the beloved local dessert chendol with a stuffing of pandan-tinged coconut.
Find out more here.
Coconut can also be had at The Marmalade Pantry, another long-standing local cafe brand, in one of its new baked mooncake flavours for Mid-Autumn Festival 2023. Taiwanese red bean, yam, and creamy lotus paste meet shredded coconut for an indulgent and texture-rich festive treat.
The coconutty bake is accompanied by a contemporary reimagination of the baked classic, pairing lotus paste enriched with Assam tea and Hokkaido milk with plump raisins. Additionally, a buttery crusted mooncake stuffed with contrasting sweet, nutty notes from black sesame and red lotus paste is presented in a beautiful velvet jewellery box.
Find out more here.
St. Regis Singapore’s Yan Ting has artfully curated their mooncakes for this season. The Cantonese restaurant provides a novel array of both baked and snow skin mooncakes, all wrapped up in a polished lacquer box. Their snow skin range balances fruity and mellow in one pastry.
One of them is the Coconut and Jackfruit Lotus Paste with Pistachio Truffle. Coconut is paired with a burst of tartness from the jackfruit, before being mellowed by the earthy pistachio.
Find out more here.