Sheng Kee Bakery

Sheng Kee Bakery is a small (11 stores) chain of Asian bakeries in the San Francisco bay area.

"Sheng Kee Bakery strives to create meaningful, multigenerational, memories with our community while carrying on an Asian baking legacy by linking together traditional and nostalgic flavors with modern techniques to bring you a piece of home wherever you go."

They sell a variety of baked goods including bread, cakes, mooncakes, and pastries.  I'd love to try some of their sweet buns (taro, pineapple, etc) sometime or any of the savories (mmm, pork sung!), but I haven't actually visited nor ordered from Sheng Kee Bakery myself.  Instead, their signature mooncakes were featured at a Lunar New Year party I attended.

Red Bean & Green Tea.

They make the mooncakes in a fairly large variety of flavors: the expected red bean, lotus, and date, plus oolong, tea & chestnut, and longan. The mooncakes all have the same pattern on top, so you can't tell which flavor one is from the looks alone.

Yes, they have lard.

Mixed Nut & Lotus Salted Egg Mooncakes. (Small).

The ones we had were their smallest size mooncakes, about 2 ounces.  

Lotus & Salted Egg.

This was a very standard, good enough, moon cake.

The pastry itself was soft and fresh tasting.  I liked the amount of lotus wrapping the egg yolk, and it was very lightly and pleasantly sweetened.  It was smooth and soft.  The yolk had a strong cured flavor, intense yolk, as you'd expect.

Basically, all pretty decent quality, good ratios, as expected.  It didn't blow me away as unique or particularly special, but it was a well made moon cake.  I enjoyed a second one with my breakfast another morning, and liked it even more then, lightly warmed up.  3.5/5.

Mixed Nut.

"Golden-brown crust densely filled with an assortment of mixed nuts."

Next up, mixed nuts. Mixed nuts in this case means walnuts and almonds, plus sesame seeds and what turned out to be melon seeds(!!!!).  I'm terribly allergic to melons, and started having a reaction to this immediately.  As you can see, it was absolutely loaded up with nuts and seeds.  They  were lightly soft but still crunchy, and fairly savory.  Not much sweetness added, which for some reason I had expected, more akin to an American style nut pie I think is what I envisioned.  I ended up drizzling Thai gula melaka over it, and quite enjoyed the result, but without that, this really wasn't much of a dessert.

The pastry was less soft, and seemed less flavorful compared to the previous variety, but also, it was just fairly insignificant compared to the nuts.  I barely noticed the pastry.  This was all about the nuts/seeds.

So overall, fine, but not quite what I found myself really seeking out.  3/5.