Kwan Lac Bakery — Restaurant in Monterey Park

Great pastries! Usually buy the mantau, sponge cake, Chinese donut, sesame balls, and the sesame flat Chinese donut there.

Mantau is a plain steamed bread. These come in white or wheat. Love them both. They are moist and freeze well. Just make sure to steam the frozen ones when you want to eat them. Rehydrates them nicely.

The sponge cake is very eggy so if you like the strong smell of whipped eggs in your sponge cake, you will love these! These cakes come plain with no decorations. Don't need any. They come in two sizes. I always get the bigger cakes. Can't get enough of them and one is good to share. Otherwise, I will eat the whole smaller one.

The Chinese donut is the long fried salty donut. The hollow pockets inside are great for filling with rice porridge or coffee with condense milk or the condense milk by itself. In the rice porridge, it becomes a dumpling and adds texture to the smooth and tasty porridge. Yum! This donut needs to be eaten on the same day or it isn't great the second day. Since it is fried, the donut gets hard and oily on the second day. Can be baked and then eaten with porridge but not as good the second day. The chewiness is gone.

The sesame ball came in two flavors: red bean filling (black sesame on the outside) or mung bean filling ( white sesame on the outside). Both are tasty. Wrap is a rice dough similar in texture to mochi.

The flat sesame Chinese donut is a sweet fried dough. This also needs to be eaten the same day. Very tender with a slight sweetness to the dough. Great eaten alone or with a cup of coffee with condense milk. Yum!

Today, I tried the pork bao and the sweet rice with pork wrapped in bamboo leaves. These were not bad.

The pork bao just has season pork and onions in it. Usually there is half an egg, a piece of black Chinese mushroom, Chinese sausage slice, and the seasoned ground pork. This one didn't have the egg, black Chinese mushroom, or Chinese sausage slice. Pork was seasoned with salt and pepper. The dough part was fluffy. These can be frozen and resteamed before eating.

The wrapped sweet rice and filling was good too. The fatty pork in the sweet rice made the rice flavorful. Also has a piece of Chinese sausage and a salted egg yolk in it. Salted egg yolk is one of my favorites! These don't last so they must be eaten right away or refrigerated a day or two at most and resteamed before eating. Keeping them longer runs the risk of them going bad.

This bakery also sells great filled sweet buns too. They have lotus seed, taro, or mung bean paste in the buns. Great on the day purchased or they can be frozen and resteamed prior to...

One of the best HongKong style bakeries in town that I have recently discovered.

This store is small and looks so humble. However, seeing is truly deceiving.

When you have their sweet cupcake, Chinese donuts, and a cup of HongKong style milk tea is the best combination to fully enjoy and dive yourself into the quality of HongKong style bakery.

See you until the next posting...

Please Stay Healthy, Be Safe, and Be Well, everyone!

Have a Blessed...

Stopped by this longtime local Cantonese bakery on a Sunday morning to grab Chinese cruellers. Unfortunately, they stopped making it due to the high labor cost and the fact the they are laborious to make.

However, I did grab a sponge cake and some deep fried sesame dough (don’t know what they’re called in English). Spongecake was divine - super fluffy, moist, just a tad of sweetness and affordable.

It was nice chatting with the lady behind...