Mad about moon cakes: Try Pegasus Bakery & Cafe in south Sacramento

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With the mid-Autumn Festival upon us, I (and many others) headed to the best local place to find moon cakes: Pegasus Bakery & Cafe, a Hong Kong-influenced pastry shop in a well-trafficked south Sacramento shopping center at 6825 Stockton Blvd., Suite 265.

For those who haven’t experienced the joy of moon cakes ($3 each) before, they’re small, dense circular sweets typically eaten during the annual festival honoring Chang’e, the Chinese moon goddess whose story can be read here. Each cake has a thin crust stamped with the Mandarin word for its paste filling.

I grabbed cakes with the four types of fillings Pegasus had out: red bean, green bean (not that kind), lotus seed and white lotus seed. Other fillings such as winter melon or assorted nuts could be pre-ordered. Sweet but not saccharine, a little dry but not chalky, they all had a bit of a toasty, nutty flavor from the crust.

Among fillings, I liked the deep, rich lotus seed the best.

It being lunchtime, I also picked up a couple of Pegasus’ savory options. The chicken sticky rice ($5.50) wrapped in a lotus leaf with shitake mushrooms, meatballs, sausage and a quail egg could have probably satiated me alone, but at that price, why not add a garlic ham bun ($2.50)?

Openings and closings

• “Prohibition ends here” at Lincoln Speakeasy Taproom, a brick-walled beer bar and restaurant that held its grand opening upstairs in the old Lincoln Brand Feeds building on Saturday. Food includes burgers, charcuterie boards and deep-fried bar bites at 436 Lincoln Blvd., Suite 202 in Lincoln. Mention the password listed online each week (currently “giggle water”) to the bartender for a surprise.
• The region’s richest wealth of Korean food (Rancho Cordova) got another addition in Seoulzip Korean Restaurant, which opened earlier this month. Entrees like agujjim (spicy braised monkfish) and seolleongtang (boiled ox knee soup) aren’t found at many other places nearby.