Harvest Festivals : Full Moon With Cake

Kien Giang Bakery in Echo Park is in full holiday regalia. Red lanterns dangle outside; employees wear cheerful red shirts, and red boxes by the hundreds are being packed with luscious mooncakes.

For a month before the Chinese moon festival each fall, the bakery runs two shifts. That’s what it takes to produce thousands of sweet cakes, each specially shaped and stamped with a design indicating what’s inside. Tradition is to nibble on the cakes while admiring the brightest and biggest full moon of the year. (That moon appears Monday through Wednesday nights next week. The official festival date is Tuesday.)

Bakery owner Henry Wong, a Chinese-Vietnamese, makes cakes to please both cultures. Wong is from Kien Giang in South Vietnam. Last year and again this past March, he went to Hanoi to research a northern Vietnamese mooncake called banh deo . This pale-ivory mooncake is wrapped in glutinous rice flour dough. Inside are a choice of mixed nuts, lotus paste or mung beans. Wong adds a dash of jasmine flavoring, but in Vietnam the cake would be scented with an essence extracted from grapefruit blossoms.

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The typical mooncake is golden brown. At Kien Giang, the cakes are coated with a pastry composed of cake flour, sugar cooked to a brown syrup and cottonseed oil. The cakes are formed by hand. To make lotus paste mooncakes, workers wrap a tennis ball-sized hunk of filling with a thin layer of pastry and press it with a plunger-like mold. The cakes are baked twice. Before the second baking, they’re brushed with egg wash to add a shiny finish.

Mooncakes will keep for a month in an airtight container, Wong says. More fragile than other mooncakes, banh deo should be eaten within 10 days. All should be stored at room temperature. Refrigeration makes them unpleasantly hard.

One of Wong’s specialties is a mooncake made with durian, the Southeast Asian fruit known (even notorious) for its powerful aroma. Wong also makes a coconut mooncake. The filling combines macaroon coconut, glistening shreds of a Philippine coconut variety called macapuno , and coconut milk.

To Wong’s knowledge, he is the only baker who has mastered the taro mooncake. The trick is to get the correct consistency without diluting the taro flavor with thickeners. Wong steams the taro, then cooks it in a wok with oil and sugar.

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Traditional Chinese mooncake fillings include mixed nuts, lotus paste, black date, mung bean and red bean. Wong even makes shark’s fin mooncakes, mixing the shredded fins with mixed nuts and bits of Chinese sausage. A box of four shark’s fin cakes costs $25; it makes a prestigious gift.

The biggest seller is the mixed nut mooncake, Wong says. The filling includes cashews, almonds, pumpkin, sesame and watermelon seeds and candied winter melon. The nut cake is square while those filled with pastes are round.

Mooncakes wouldn’t be mooncakes without a moon-shaped ingredient: the salted yolk of a duck egg. Wong gets these from China and puts from one to three in an average-size mooncake. He also makes “moonless” mooncakes, omitting the egg to please vegetarians and cholesterol watchers.

When Wong opened his bakery in 1980, he sold only 200 boxes of mooncakes a season. Now he distributes to markets in Los Angeles and Orange County and ships by air as far as Orlando, Fla.--”wherever Vietnamese and Chinese live,” he says.

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The bakery is a family operation. Wong’s children help out after school. Wife Helen shapes large pig-shaped mooncakes by hand. The whimsical design shows a sow nursing a row of piglets. Smaller pig cakes are shaped with wooden molds hand-carved by Vietnamese. The pigs appeal to youngsters, Wong says. In Vietnam, children observe the moon festival by parading with lanterns similar to those that Wong has strung in the sales area of the bakery.

This year, Wong has introduced mini-mooncakes, just large enough for a single serving. Individually wrapped, the mini-cakes come in boxes of four, two filled with lotus paste and two with mixed nuts. That way, moon-watchers can select their favorite flavor rather than cutting up and sharing larger cakes. At the other extreme, there’s a jumbo cake stuffed with six egg yolks and packed one to a box.

Prices range from $8 for a box of four mini-cakes to $16 for the jumbo cake. The large pig, available by special order only, is $10; a small pig without egg yolk is $2. Mixed nut cakes containing one egg yolk are priced at $14 for a box of four, or $3.50 each.

Kien Giang Bakery is on Echo Park Avenue just off Sunset Boulevard in the heart of a Latino shopping district. The bakery maintains a side trade in Western cakes for that market, and Wong travels extensively to study baking techniques.

Mooncakes will be available at the bakery until Monday. The largest selection of Kien Giang mooncakes outside the bakery is at Viet-Huong, a Chinatown restaurant and deli heaped with Vietnamese specialties for takeout.

Kien Giang Bakery Inc., 1471 Echo Park Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 250-0159. Open daily from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Viet-Huong restaurant, 727 N. Broadway, No. 107, Los Angeles; (213) 626-0764. Open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.