OF ALL the dread-provoking Christmas gifts—all the reindeer sweaters and buzzing children’s toys—perhaps none is as feared as the fruitcake: a football-sized dessert, wrapped in lurid red foil. It will often lurk reprovingly on sideboards and in refrigerators for months before being finally, furtively, chucked out.

For the Chinese and Vietnamese, the equivalent is the mooncake: a dense, round pastry that—based on your correspondent’s highly informal survey—people seem much fonder of giving than eating. The cakes are stuffed with a variety of high-calorie fillings, often based on lotus seeds, nuts or sweet bean-paste. As with much of Chinese cuisine, mooncakes vary by region: in Shanghai and eastern China the filling often includes pork and tends to be savoury; Henan mooncakes are crisp and almost biscuit; Teochew mooncakes are often yam.

Mooncakes are particularly associated with the Mid-Autumn Festival, a harvest holiday that stems from a millennia-old Chinese practice of moon worship, which this year falls on September 27th (the date not just of a full moon but also, in much of the world, a lunar eclipse). Their roundness symbolises the moon, as does the salted egg yolk at their centre.

In recent years, a bevy of newer varieties have sprung up alongside the traditional nut- and bean-based ones. A saleswoman at one of Singapore’s luxury hotels says that their bestseller this year is a snowskin mooncake—which gets its name from the pounded-rice dough that must be kept either refrigerated or frozen—stuffed with a milk chocolate and Earl Grey tea filling dotted with chocolate pearls. Other filling flavours include durian, Irish whiskey and cognac; in China organic and vegan mooncakes are having a moment.

Tempting as it is to condemn these innovations as non-traditional, Fuchsia Dunlop, a British authority on Chinese food, notes that “cuisines are living cultural artefacts…they are a response to where we are now.” And where we are now is a world in which Chinese chefs often travel to the West, just as increasing numbers of Westerners seek their fortunes in the Sinosphere. Its cuisine reflects such interchanges.

Mooncakes are also now a mass-market treat, sold at Starbucks and supermarkets. But while they may be selling like hotcakes in the diaspora, in China the story is different. An ongoing crackdown on graft by Xi Jinping, its president, has depressed sales at the high end of the mooncake market, where a box of four can easily cost more than $150.