IT'S mooncake season. And with the economy booming, hotels and other mooncake purveyors are coming out with ever more exotic flavour combinations, stuffing everything from fat-laden macadamia nuts to bird's nest into these baked or snowskin pastries.
The pickings are slim for those looking to indulge healthily, but LifeStyle has found at least four places offering healthier versions.
Singapore Marriott Hotel has its Snowskin Wild Strawberry Yogurt mooncake (main picture), filled with a frozen mix of strawberries and low-fat yogurt.
Harbour City Restaurant in Alexandra Road offers sugarless mooncakes while the Tung Lok Group is introducing mooncakes with a salted egg yolk substitute made of white kidney beans and cream cheese.
Calorie and fat-laden mooncakes are given as gifts and eaten during the annual mid-autumn festival, which falls on Sept 25 this year.
Ms Lim Su Lin, chief dietician at the National University Hospital, says that a 200g baked lotus paste mooncake without salted egg yolks contains 762 calories, while a similar snow skin version has 746 calories.
One salted egg yolk, a popular addition to mooncakes, adds 90 calories to the mooncake, and can increase the cholesterol count of a baked lotus paste mooncake by over 22 times, she adds.
Spotting a niche market, some sellers have moved to make these pastries less of a calorie bomb.
The Marriott introduced its 98 per cent fat free strawberry yogurt snowskin mooncake last year to cater to health-conscious customers, alongside those filled with muesli and flavoured with jasmine tea.
This year, it dropped the other two and kept the best-selling strawberry one ($6 each or $40 for a box of eight mini mooncakes).
Harbour City Restaurant started offering sugarless mooncakes ($43 for a box of four) in 2003, and sales have increased every year since then, although it declined to give figures. However, the restaurant says that for every 10 mooncakes sold, three are of the sugarless variety.
Instead of using sugar to sweeten the lotus paste and mooncake skin, maltitol, a naturally occurring sugar alcohol commonly used in sugar-free products such as breath mints, is used.
Maltitol matches the density of normal table sugar weight for weight, but contains only 2 to 3 calories per gram, compared to almost 4 calories per gram for normal sugar.
Dessert cafe chain Bakerzin uses another sugar substitute, trehalose, in some of its snowskin mooncakes ($28 for a box of eight mini mooncakes, above right).
Although it has the same number of calories per gram as sugar, trehalose is about half as sweet, and does not promote tooth decay as much as normal sugar.
Director Daniel Tay says this year's range of reduced sugar mooncakes, which have fillings such as orange paste and yam paste, are 'selling, but not fantastically'.
'People still prefer the traditional lotus paste variety,' he says.
Those who do can get them with a salted egg yolk substitute from Tung Lok.
Called bean yolk mooncakes, the 'yolk' in these mooncakes is made of white kidney beans and cream cheese ($34 to $38 for a box of four).
But whether it is sugarless mooncakes or cholesterol-free egg yolk substitutes, dietician Ms Lim points out that while a mooncake may contain nutritious ingredients, there may still be other ingredients that make it unhealthy.
For example, the cream cheese in the bean yolk mooncake has a high fat content comparable to that of a salted egg yolk.
'It all depends on how much white kidney beans Tung Lok uses in proportion to cream cheese,' she says.
Her advice for mooncake lovers?
'Go ahead and eat your mooncakes. You do it only once a year,' she says. 'But do so in moderation. Less than a quarter of a mooncake a day will do and savour it while it lasts. That's how you enjoy food, but still keep healthy.'
Harbour City Restaurant in Alexandra Road offers sugarless mooncakes while the Tung Lok Group is introducing mooncakes with a salted egg yolk substitute made of white kidney beans and cream cheese.
