Today, I revisited the Food Place food court, located at Pavilion Mall. The food court is located beside the Oriental Kopi Restaurant.
This time, I ordered a white lotus with bakkwa mooncake from the Bee Cheng Hiang stall, which costs RM82.00 per mooncake.
The White Lotus with Bakkwa Mooncake is an interesting meeting point between a classic Chinese mooncake and one of Singapore's most recognisable food products: bak kwa.
The mooncake has a deep golden-brown, baked pastry shell with an elaborate traditional pattern pressed into the top. Cutting it open reveals a thick, smooth layer of white lotus paste, with pieces of bak kwa embedded inside. The combination gives the mooncake a particularly distinctive sweet-and-savoury character.
The first impression is the familiar richness of a traditional baked mooncake. The pastry contributes a lightly crisp, fragrant exterior, while the white lotus filling is dense, smooth and sweet, with the characteristic mellow flavour of lotus seeds.
Then comes the surprise: small pieces of bakkwa introduce a salty, savoury and smoky-meaty note into the otherwise sweet lotus paste.
That contrast is really the point of this mooncake. Rather than making the whole filling savoury, Bee Cheng Hiang uses bakkwa almost like a savoury accent.
The bakkwa also gives the filling some texture, preventing the otherwise very smooth lotus paste from becoming monotonous.
A modern mooncake rather than an ancient traditional recipe
There is an important distinction when discussing its history.
White Lotus with Bakkwa is not an ancient traditional mooncake flavour. It is a modern product created by Bee Cheng Hiang as part of its Signature Mooncake range.
Bee Cheng Hiang announced the White Lotus with Bakkwa Mooncake in July 2024, describing it as a new addition to its Signature Series. The company already had other bakkwa-based mooncakes, including its Signature Bakkwa Mooncake and Bakkwa Floss Mooncake.
The concept is quite clever: instead of simply making another conventional mooncake, Bee Cheng Hiang takes its most famous product—bakkwa—and incorporates it into a Mid-Autumn Festival staple.
In other words, the history of this mooncake is relatively recent, but the two foods inside it have much older traditions.
This is also a good example of modern Malaysian/Singaporean Chinese food culture—traditional festive food being reinvented using a familiar local flavour.
