Speaking of Huilai's snacks, they are very rich. The most famous ones are mung bean cake, Jinghai bean series, Jinghai (Yuelao) Bangsu, Longjiang pig's foot, potato flour fruit, sweet potato cake, powder bite, roll chapter, fish yeast, shrimp jujube...
For the "navel cake", probably only Huilai in the Chaoshan region knows a little more.
Because the Qingming Festival uses "navel cake" to hang paper, it is generally not done at other times, so it is not familiar to outsiders, and few people have eaten it.
In Huilai, the sacrifice during tomb sweeping is generally sugar cakes, which are distributed to the tomb sweepers as snacks and distributed to local shepherd boys. This kind of cake is called cow cake by locals, also known as belly button cake. The round tunic is filled with sugar oil, hollow and crispy, and there is a hole in the middle of the cake that pokes one with chopsticks.
Navel cake, also known as "money cake", "brown sugar cake", "double stove cake", in its simple and unpretentious pasta, just injected with a piece of brown syrup, but become a surprising taste and texture. The thin crispy caramelized crust exudes a rich sweet potato aroma, and the entrance is light and sweet; the caramelized crust of the crust is soft and crispy with the texture of the brown sugar filling, which is sweet but not greasy and chewy.
The name of the navel cake is very vivid, and there is a dark red circle in the center of the cake, like a belly button eye, listening to the teacher Fu said that this is related to its practice.
Using wheat flour, sweet potato, white sugar, repeated kneading and pressing molding, when making the cake, and then dig a hole in the cake, squeeze in the air, and then pour brown sugar, so that the syrup will not stick together, but form a thin layer, is the essence. Such inverted, sweet but not greasy, lips and teeth left fragrant.
Fill your stomach with a low-calorie sweet potato with eye-catching brown sugar and fine wheat flour. The whole process, there are no other superfluous additives, it is a simple and authentic taste, and no matter how much you eat, you will not worry about long meat.
Why is there such a design as the navel, it turns out that this is related to the raw material of the navel cake. Because the pie filling adds a lot of sugar, the sugar will break the crust when it is melted and expanded by heat, and the syrup and lard will overflow to the outside, so leave a hole first, let the excess syrup naturally flow out of the small hole, and the cake can remain intact.
From the production of navel cakes, we can see the characteristics of Chaoshan cuisine and the wisdom of folk. A small breathable hole solves the problem that the navel cake may crack during the baking process, and also inadvertently achieves the characteristics of this kind of cake.
Edited 丨 Eight Festivals of the Year