🥮 Mooncake emoji

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a major holiday observed each year in East and Southeast Asian cultures around the world, especially in China and Vietnam. It starts on the 15th day of the eighth month according to the lunar calendar. In the Gregorian calendar, the festival is observed in September or October each year.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is an ancient harvest festival, historically involving worship of a moon deity associated with fertility. Today, the holiday celebrates family, togetherness, and thanksgiving, and is observed with the lighting of beautiful lanterns and the giving and eating of mooncakes, both symbols of the moon.

Mooncakes—or yuèbǐng (月饼) in Chinese—are a round pastry filled with red bean and lotus seed paste, sometimes filled with two salted duck yolks. Its circular shape resembles a full moon, which is an emblem of completeness and unity. This beloved delicacy and important symbol is what the Mooncake emoji 🥮 depicts and is intended to honor.

Wikipedia

The emoji was approved in 2018 under Unicode 11.0, the same year Unicode approved two other emoji associated with Chinese culture: Firecracker 🧨 and Red Envelope 🧧 emoji, which are used to celebrate Chinese New Year. The 2017 proposal for the Mooncake emoji 🥮 observed:

Currently, the dessert emoji selection does not include any iconic Chinese desserts, while it has a lot of western and Japanese desserts. Thus the MOONCAKE emoji would be a great addition to the existing food and drinks emojis to better reflect the dessert choices enjoyed by people around the world. 

For their Mooncake emoji 🥮, major platforms depict a moon cake with an ornamental design on its crust, often with a wedge cut out as revealing a yolk inside. Twitter’s moon cake features the Chinese character for “fall/autumn” or “harvest” (秋) on its crust.