"Cake" has long been popular in China, and the han Dynasty Yang Xiong's book "Dialects" has the title of "cake", which was popular by the time of the Wei and Jin Dynasties. Printing cake board is used to print shapes and patterns of wooden templates when making cake balls, and the patterns are mostly from the common flowers, birds, melons and fruits, cows, sheep, chickens and geese, fat babies, carps, etc. common in labor and life, and there are also auspicious words such as fu, lu, shou, and xi. In the old days, in the water town area of Jiangnan, every New Year's Festival, building houses and beams, timding imports, and marrying birthdays, every household had to make some cake dumplings with rice noodles. The grains are ground into flour, mixed with honey osmanthus flowers and other ingredients, kneaded, and then squeezed and scraped in the impression one by one. Then turn the cake board over and pat it a few times, and the "miniature relief" stands out from the impression. Steaming on the stove is delicious. These carved templates for making pastries are the cake board.
Cake board impressions are generally made of oily wood, rosewood, poplar wood, camphor wood, etc. as raw materials, and are made of sawing board, groove, and carving. The carving style has a fine carving, such as "full dragon", "ruyi" and "three animals"; there are also rough and refined, such as "shou peach", "flower", "green leaf", etc., the carved template concave surface is trapezoidal, the shape of the cake mold, the pattern is different, according to the type: there are shou peach, yuanbao, full dragon, pisces, ruyi, eight immortals, three animals, etc.; according to the content: there are animals, flowers, auspicious patterns, and there are good mouthmark characters such as "shou", "fu", "four seasons of peace", "golden wanliang" and other good mouthmark characters as patterns. "It is for this auspicious word that each pattern corresponds to an auspicious word.
Song Wu Zimu has such a record in the "Record of Dream Liang": the cake dumplings in Hangzhou, Jiangnan have "gold and silver scorched peony cakes, variegated fried flower steamed buns, jujube hoop lotus cakes, hibiscus cakes, chrysanthemum cakes, moon cakes", and the history of printing cake boards has a long history, at least dating back to the Song Dynasty. Printed cake is an inseparable part of the life of the people of Laodi, whenever the New Year festival, build a house on the beam, Tim Ding import, worship the birthday wedding, every household must use new rice flour to make some cake dumplings. Wedding cakes, there are also "happy cakes" and "sitting bottom cakes". On the third day of the baby's birth, the "three baptisms" are held, using patterns such as "Tan Kai Rich" and "Thousand Sons and Hundred Grandchildren"; when children read, the pattern of the cake printing cake should have "carp jumping dragon gate", "Zhuangyuan and the first" and "four arts", etc., which conveys the expectations of the elders for the child to get ahead in the future. Whenever traditional festivals such as spring festival, Qingming, Lixia, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Chongyang and Winter Solstice arrive, the people also make various patterns of printing cakes.
Regarding the origin of the yin cake, it is said that Fan Zhongyan, a famous scholar of the Song Dynasty, had a very poor family when he was a child, and he took refuge in the mantra bowl nunnery under the Tianping Mountain in Suzhou. Because the mantra bowl was in disrepair and very desolate, Fan Zhongyun ate porridge three times a day and enlarged his belly, he thought of a way, put the porridge on the plate and froze it, like tofu, the porridge was divided into pieces, and when he was hungry at night, he took a piece to eat. Such a square porridge, named "white cloud cake", friend Shi Meiqing improved this, let people use glutinous rice flour to imitate Fan Zhongyan's "white cloud cake" to make a square cake, later called white seal cake.
In the old days, it was often used as a dry food for those who went to Beijing to take the exam. The cake mold form is varied, the pattern is rich and colorful, and it contains the simple thoughts and emotions of the majority of the people and the yearning for a better life. Because "cake" and "high" are harmonious, when you meet the seasonal festival, you will climb high and eat cakes, which means to ascend step by step. Cakes are made according to local traditional customs to express the pursuit of ideals, the yearning for a better life, and the expectations, nostalgia and sustenance of relatives and friends. With the improvement of modern living standards, the pastries we eat now are almost all machine-pressed. The custom of carving cake plates and hand-making printed cakes has slowly lost its practical value, and has been unfamiliar or even forgotten. Unfortunately, such a beautiful trick has disappeared from today's pastries.
