Philly’s most unique mooncakes
Nobody in Philly makes mooncakes like A La Mousse owner Anna Chen, who fills hers with everything from Dubai chocolate to Oreos and Hong Kong milk tea.
Mooncakes often have a less-than-stellar reputation. They’re beautiful thanks to the intricate molds they’re made with, but they’re usually better to look at than eat. At Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the four major Chinese holidays — which falls on Sept. 25 this year — people give and receive them much like fruitcakes at Christmas (without anyone actually eating them).
One Philadelphia pastry chef is reversing mooncakes’ bad rap.
Nobody in Philly is making mooncakes like Anna Chen, the owner of A La Mousse. While most Chinatown bakeries sell conventional versions — made from wheat flour, lacquered with egg wash, and stuffed with lotus bean paste and duck egg yolks — Chen’s are vibrantly colored and stuffed with a range of fillings that cross cultures and marry flavors. Think Oreo cookies with Hong Kong milk tea and Taiwanese pineapple cake with salted duck eggs.
Chen’s three bakeries — A La Mousse in Chinatown and Narberth, and Maison Sweet in University City — specialize in mousse cakes, but she and her staff prepare about 400 to 500 boxes of mooncakes every year before Mid-Autumn Festival.
Chen’s approach aligns with an inventive, sometimes wacky strain of mooncake that has emerged in Asia in recent years, as mooncake makers abandon ultrasweet lotus- and winter melon-paste versions in favor of updated varieties stuffed with ice cream, matcha cream, and even beef. They sometimes also trade the traditional dough for flaky pastry or thin mochi skins (referred to as “snow skin”), which are more commonly made by Vietnamese pastry chefs.
Chen takes inspiration from her travels around China, especially to cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, as well as popular trends in Hong Kong, where she grew up and returns to visit every two years. “Every year we make different flavors, but we keep one or two mooncakes traditional, because that’s what people keep asking me for,” Chen said.
This year, the traditional flavor is pork floss with salted egg yolk; hers is masterful, a delicate balance of savory and sweet — though none of her mooncakes are extremely sweet, in another departure from convention. The other flavors in this year’s box set of eight mooncakes, which sells for $65, include Dubai chocolate (Chen’s current favorite) and purple sweet potato with salted egg yolk.
“We don’t want to follow anyone else’s style, we only want to create our own special mooncakes,” Chen said.
Chen starts preparing for the season in early August, ordering items like mooncake sugar syrup (also known as golden invert sugar syrup), flowery molds, and specially designed mooncake packaging from China. Then, in September, she and her pastry chefs — along with her daughter Joanne, a student at Drexel — get to work, rolling fillings into balls and stuffing them into rice flour-based skins before pressing them into mooncake molds.
Chen, who opened Chinatown’s A La Mousse 13 years ago, has longtime customers who often order 30 to 40 boxes at once to give as gifts.
Even as her creations are trend-driven, she does stick to one tradition: embedding whole egg yolks in most of her mooncakes. The yolks represent the full moon, one of the most important emblems of the Mid-Autumn Festival, symbolizing family reunions and the idea of wholeness.
A La Mousse’s mooncakes are available for pre-ordered pickup and must be ordered two to three days in advance via a Google form.
A La Mousse, 145 N 11th St., 215-238-9100; A La Mousse, 920 Montgomery Ave., Narberth, 610-664-6888; Maison Sweet, 2930 Chestnut St., 215-387-1388, instagram.com/alamousse
