This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food and culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, sign up here.
Today, I’m writing with the best news! After a year-long hiatus, we’re bringing The Foundry Bakery’s Taiwanese mooncakes back to our online and physical shop for the Mid-Autumn holiday, available for only three short weeks. Act fast—the order deadline for the first delivery (week of September 14th) is September 13th (sorry!). If you miss that one, there are two more batches afterwards. And, we’ll also have them in store from September 18th and on (call first, please!).
Scroll on for all the flavors, including a new one we’ve introduced since we last collaborated in 2024. And keep scrolling for a peek at our packaging design process and the old-school Taiwanese bakeries that inspired it.
Finally, if you’re keeping an eye out for our annual Taiwanese Mid-Autumn BBQ, we’re sad to report we must skip it this year. The lot next to our shop is under construction, and, as of now, they’ve got the entire block walled off, including the sidewalk just outside of the shop, and there simply isn’t enough room. Hope to see you soon, anyway.
I’m pasting an unedited, unretouched, .HEIC image (directly airdropped from my phone) of four beautiful mooncakes made by The Foundry Bakery. I have to show you how glorious they are, even after being touched by the uncanny Apple post-processing algorithms. No filter, no AI retouch, just pure handcrafted mooncakes in the all-revealing sunlight and hyperactive camera software.
Total eclipse of the heart. I’m so excited that we’re bringing back these exquisite cakes, made completely from scratch by The Foundry Bakery, our good friends and collaborators in St. Louis.
This year we are offering four flavors in an assorted box of six. Each set contains two taro, two mung bean black sesame, one red date goji walnut, and one red bean salted egg. They are extra large, extra planetary, extra fancy. The coloring comes from natural ingredients like beet juice and turmeric; the fillings are all made from scratch, starting with whole beans and taro; the crispy laminated shell is built by hand by master baker Ray Yeh himself.
Just look at the cross section on the red date cake. You can see the goji berry seeds:
The cakes will be packed in an easy-to-recycle kraft paper box with graphics inspired by old-school Taiwanese bakeries. The packaging is en-route, but here’s my mockup in studio.
Read on.
The Foundry Bakery
The mooncakes are baked for us by The Foundry Bakery, a Taiwanese-American bakery in St. Louis founded by Ray and Leah Yeh. They opened it after graduate school at WashU, where Leah was working on an MBA and Ray was studying genetics. I discovered them in 2023, desperately seeking Taiwanese food while visiting my in-laws. We’ve been friends since, and launched our first collaboration in 2024. I’m thankful to Ray and Leah for sharing their talents with us!
Their mooncakes are made in the Taiwanese style. To me, that generally suggests a flaky, laminated dough, made with 油酥, or an oil roux, as opposed to the softer molded types more commonly seen in Hong Kong. Foundry adds their own touch: a many-layered, visibly flaky laminated shell 明酥 that’s crispy, soft, and melt-in-your-mouth. This is the textbook definition of the texture word su 酥, which is also a character used in words describing shortbread. Exposing the layers isn’t just beautiful, but a way for the baker to show their skill: when all the edges are exposed, there’s nowhere to hide an imperfect job.
This mooncake box is truly special and is the product of a collaboration between two small Taiwanese businesses working across time zones. Foundry did the very hard work of making the cakes, and we took on creating packaging and imagery that reflect all that goes into them.
Mooncake Flavors
The mooncakes come in four flavors, including a new red date flavor this year. Here they are in all their glory, shot on a mirror and split in half, with our poetic little descriptions.
Taro 芋頭酥月餅: Made from fresh, hand-mashed taro, this monochromatic mooncake is simple and decadent at the same time. The pillowy texture of the taro contrasts with the structure of the impressively laminated crust. The color reminds us of that silvery evening light in deep autumn. Each set contains two.
Mung Bean Black Sesame 綠豆椪月餅: This is The Foundry Bakery’s take on a classic Taiwanese-style mooncake. It features a pale (lunar) crust, delicately prepared mung bean paste, and a surprise soft middle of black sesame paste. The many laminations in the crust speak to the art required to craft it. The contrast in the sandy texture of the sugared black sesame and the smooth texture of the bean paste is almost cosmic, like a planet’s crust to its core. Each set contains two.
Red Bean Salted Egg 蛋黃酥月餅: This one’s made from whole organic red beans pureed into a rich, nutty, and sustaining filling. Cushioned within, like a treasure, is a salted egg yolk. No, not the dry crumbly kind, but the decadent, savory, sunny kind. The laminated crust is thin, light, and holds it all together. Shiny from its egg wash and topped with black sesame seeds, the cake makes a striking and familiar visual on the table. Each set contains one.
Red Date Goji Berry 紅棗枸杞酥月餅: A new addition to the set, this cake is a classic pairing of jujube, goji berry, and walnut, with beet juice for color. The flavor is fruity, from the date and berry, but also rich with red bean aroma. The walnut offsets the sweetness of the filling with its crunch and signature sophistication. The flaky outside looks pink in some light, and red in others, like the ephemeral sanguine moon. Each set contains one.
Ordering Details
If you’d like a set, please order one online, or come into the shop to pick one up!
They are shipping out in three batches:
Week of Sept 14th (order cut off date Sept 13th, sorry for the rush)
Week of Sept 21st (order cut off date Sept 20th)
Week of Sept 28th (order cut off date Sept 27th)
We’ll have them in store from around Sept 18th, while supplies last.
The mooncakes are baked to order and shipped right away. They are estimated to arrive in up to 4 days from the ship date, depending on your location. Most orders are shipped via UPS and should arrive by Saturday of the week they are shipped, barring unforeseen circumstances.
Shipping is free, and we’re offering discounts on two or more sets, because that really helps us save on the shipping margin.
Regarding the Packaging
Mooncakes are notoriously fragile and hard to pack! They also (notoriously?) come in the most fancy of packages.
Here’s an “Hermès” “bag” that’s actually a mooncake box:
And a suitcase. TSA pre-check approved!
These are admittedly fun, but I’ve always favored old school bakery and packaging that made the most of economical materials like string and paper.
My favorite mooncake packaging looks like this:
This is from Old Ancient Moon Pastry Shop 舊古月製餅舖, a mung bean cake bakery in Kaohsiung. Their no frills packaging exudes grandma style. The economy! The purple ribbon but no bow! The floral stock photo! Their rich, red stamp!
When creating our packaging, I wanted to reference this lightweight style, and make something charming and easy to recycle. These packaging styles evolve from need and improvisation, and work for small businesses that don’t have the ability to manufacture large custom production runs. I also appreciate that they are easy to break down. I hate ripping apart elaborate gift box packaging and shoving it into the recycling like I just bought a new monitor.
Another reference is this mooncake packaging from Xiexingzhen Pastry Shop 協興珍餅店, where they stack cakes sideways and wrap them (like Sainsbury biscuits) with one piece of paper, a sheet of cellophane, and a lot of skill. If you wrap it the right way, the flavor name faces out, functioning as signage as well as packaging.
An article in the Liberty Times about this bakery stated the need for economical gifting solutions as a motivating factor behind this packaging. A festive, innovative, paper wrap fit the bill. In fact, the name of this style of cake is 封仔餅 hong-á-piánn, which comes from the Hokkien word for bundle, or 封. They’re widely gifted in Taitung during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
This bakery also employs one of my favorite moves ever: tying down a square piece of paper turned forty-five degrees, so the string holds down each of the corners around the box, no tape. A class act as far as topology is concerned. Classic black calligraphic type and very large phone numbers are a hallmark of the style, too.
I took this as my starting point in trying to create a paper wrap for our collaborative mooncake box. I knew a piece of paper tied down might not fly the first time around with the shipping we had to do, so I opted to reference it instead:
We have the additional responsibility of shipping ours cross-country, and the visible edge lamination is quite fragile, so we really want to minimize shaking around. Try as I might, I could not find a stock box to fit them, so I commissioned a custom fit from our favorite box maker. We invested in a cutting tool in the hopes that we will be repeating this again. So do participate! :n)
Here are my notes on the fit sent to the box producer for the round two sample:
Sidenote and only sort of related: while I was working on this, I thought about this very amazing improvised pizza box I once saw in Milan, where two strips of cardstock were bent around a pizza pie and taped down. The whole assembly was then slid into a bag, and the cardstock kept the bag off the surface of the pizza. This works for walking home with it, not delivering by e-bike, and it’s genius. I love featherweight stuff like this. I sketched it and texted it to a friend while I was working. Here it is:
Here’s an initial mockup of the box, testing the fit and thinking through the string. No bow!!!
Next I fine tuned the graphic to try to add a little color and festivity. I also changed out the newspaper background, transitioning from green to black where the bakery needs to align the wrap to the creases of the box. These mocks are looking a little more muted than actual, by the way—home inkjet.
Finally, the string! String and ribbon are so hard to get right; they’re a make or break. In the mockup above, I used yarn, but it got too fuzzy. Craft ribbon is too frilly. Jute and burlap can shed a bit too much. I was looking for twisted paper cord that was 2mm in diameter. I searched for this online and found it at an online shop called May Arts.
When I received it, the first thing I noticed was a (somewhat) prominent Made in Taiwan text on the front of the spool:
I don’t know what it was about this, but my Taiwan Pride radar went off. The way this was printed on the front in a font slightly larger than the 6pt minimums typically used got me thinking. I went to the site, and lo and behold:
Mae, the founder of this ribbon company, was a Taiwanese bow and silk flower maker that used ribbons from Taiwan. She founded this business to bring in the things she loved to use. From the site, it seems she has passed and that her family (or family friends) are operating the business. Melting!
Running this business can be very challenging and so much work. I love it with all my heart, and moments like these really make me feel connected to all those in the past and future who have elected to do the same. It’s cosmic.
I am happy to report that the cording is beautiful, simple, and well made. I hope to source it for the holiday wrapping in our shop and have already sent them a request! Please shop with May Arts!
I’m leaving a little bit of mystery here on the final product: I’d normally share a finished photo, but all the components are en route to the bakery right now. You’ll have to order a box to find out which colors we ended up going with. Don’t forget to reserve!
Miscellaneous Fun Stuff
Sort of related fun fact: shao bing 燒餅, a flaky flatbread often baked in a tandoor and a darling of Taiwanese breakfast shops the world over, is also made with oil roux, and is related to Taiwanese mooncakes in technique. I’ve been experimenting with them, and made nearly one hundred minis for Natasha Pickowicz and Lindsay Peckham’s community bake sale for Make the Road NY. An early test:
Just had to share this packaging design brief from the Sainsbury Archive, where I went digging for their 1960s biscuit wrapping. Gotta start implementing something like this at Yun Hai. I love to see historical design and creative process, how things were made before everyone had computers.
And finally, we’ve got QQ Horse and QQ Snake safari hats in grown up sizes! We’ve got you covered, literally. A small number of hats are now available online and in store.
grandma style,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉
Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.
