Address: 1675 The Chase, Mississauga ON
Website: n/a
Style: Middle Eastern
Price: $$$-$$$$
Mona is a small supermarket specializing in Middle Eastern goods from various countries on Eglinton near Mississauga Rd. And right in the middle of this small supermarket is the sweets centre, a semi-circle of glass cases (the other half is cheese, cold cuts and meat pies) with nuts, halva, baklava and cookies.
I'm not sure if they bake anything themselves or simply have a collection of goodies from various bakeries (the packaged cookies ranged from Michigan to Ottawa), but many things (like the homemade apple cake below) have a more, well, homemade look and feel to them and there must be some reason for the two ladies working in the middle. ;) Nonetheless, Mona doesn't have as impressive a selection as, say, Baklawa King, and, despite baklava being generally pricey, I can't say Mona takes home the value medal. On the contrary. The cookies, at $5.99/lb are fairly reasonable, but the baklava and phyllo creations are *expensive* at nearly $29/kg (and $13/lb), compared to $25/kg ($11/lb) at other places. Baklava being quite heavy, it's easy to overpay for pastries that are simply not as good as the 'King above or Paramount.There is one other possibility: I went there on Sunday afternoon and got a whole bunch of trays of cookies and treats (no baklava though) that they wanted to get rid of, so the price is ~30-50% cheaper. As the majority is crunchy or soaked in honey anyways, there's no difference between the fresh and less fresh varieties. Just a suggestion. :)
I also got two trays of cookies ($0.99/per tray; 4 large cookies and 8 small ones), which were of the standard cookie-press variety. (Yes, I know there's some name for these... they're not shortbread or sugar. Vanilla cookies? This is why I don't bake. ;)) But with hints of vanilla (and possibly something else? Orange water?), rolled with either chopped almonds or pistachios (the red ones look like it's coconut, but it's almonds) and filled with some sort of jam (not sure what). The jam had gotten hard in a few, so it was more chewy than soft, especially on the larger cookies, but as basic, hard 'sandwich' cookies, they weren't too bad.
As a regular priced item ($5.99/lb; I paid $2.30 for three), these were fairly dense and quite heavy dough sticks (similar to Greek loukoumades or Indian gulab) drenched in honey and baked with chunks of licorice root (I assume that's what it is) and anise seeds so that it tastes like you're biting into an ouzo cake! For someone who loves anise, this can get pretty heavenly, judging by the ecstatic and surprised "whoa" and "don't get this thing from anywhere else" from the brothers. For someone who doesn't like anise (you're uh, looking at her .__.), this can be a little surprising and overpowering. Though this confession only garnered more cheers from the brothers since they got more...
Lastly, another highlight: these.. don't know what they're called. Fried dough swirls ($0.99/tray of three pieces) soaked in honey. Mmm, so good! I don't know how they can be so saturated that they're nearly juicy, but still have a great crunch to them. It's amazing. One brother picked up some Indian sweets today -- a future post, naturally -- and bought the same thing from them but with sugar syrup instead of honey, but Mona's definitely reigned supreme. A big hit.So, in the end, I guess Mona really is quite good after all, even if it's undetermined how much they make themselves. Cookie-wise (and both the dough drizzles and anise sticks qualify), you can get quite a bit for a reasonable price, but I'm still not sure if the baklava is worth the price difference, especially since I suspect these are from elsewhere.
Rating: ***
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