Today, I revisited the Food Place food court, located at Pavilion Mall. The food court is located beside the Oriental Kopi Restaurant. It is time to try food from another stall.
This time, I ordered a Signature Floss Mooncake from the Bee Cheng Hiang stall, which costs RM82.00 per piece.
This is Bee Cheng Hiang’s Signature Floss Mooncake (肉干肉丝月饼). It is a fairly distinctive modern mooncake because it takes the flavour profile of bak kwa and pork floss and puts it into a traditional baked mooncake format.
Why Bee Cheng Hiang makes this type of mooncake
The idea makes sense when you look at Bee Cheng Hiang's history.
Bee Cheng Hiang began in Singapore in 1933, when founder Teo Swee Ee sold freshly barbecued meat as a street hawker in Chinatown. The company says the business became particularly busy during festive periods, and its bak kwa became its defining product.
The company's mooncakes therefore represent a kind of fusion between the traditional Mid-Autumn mooncake and Bee Cheng Hiang's own bak kwa heritage.
Interestingly, Bee Cheng Hiang describes another version, its Signature Bakkwa Mooncake, as being inspired by the traditional ham and assorted nuts mooncake. That version contains melon seeds, assorted nuts, orange peel and pieces of its gourmet bakkwa.
The Signature Floss Mooncake takes the concept further by incorporating the company's pork floss into the mooncake.
From the photo, the filling has several noticeable layers/components:
Golden-brown baked pastry – the outer shell is relatively thin and firm, with the characteristic glossy baked finish.
Pork floss (肉松/肉丝) – the large pale-golden fibrous section in the centre is the most visually distinctive part. Bee Cheng Hiang specifically sells its pork floss as one of its signature products.
Bak kwa-like pieces – you can see darker reddish-brown pieces distributed through the filling.
Nuts – there are visible pieces of what appear to be almond/other nuts, giving the filling some crunch.
Sweet, dense filling – rather than the smooth lotus-seed paste found in a conventional mooncake, this one has a much more textured, savoury-sweet filling.
So the eating experience is sweet pastry → chewy/fibrous pork floss → savoury-sweet bak kwa → crunchy nuts. The combination makes it quite different from a conventional lotus-paste or red-bean mooncake.
You can clearly see that this isn't simply a normal lotus-paste mooncake with a little pork floss added—the filling is deliberately constructed around meat floss, bak kwa-style pieces and nuts.
In other words, it's a good example of Singapore/Malaysia Chinese food culture adapting a traditional festival food using a distinctly local food product: bak kwa.
And that connection is particularly appropriate for Bee Cheng Hiang, whose own history goes back to a Chinatown street-hawker business selling barbecued meat in 1933.