Huangshan Baked Cake (Crab-Shell Yellow)

Huangshan baked cake, also called crab-shell yellow or Tunxi cake, is a traditional Huizhou baked pastry made by layering fine flour into pastry, filling it with Huizhou dried vegetables and diced pork, scattering white sesame and baking it against the wall of a charcoal oven, golden-hued and shaped like a crab shell.

The cake flourished across old Huizhou with Tunxi as its representative home, with a lineage of some six hundred years; folk tales attach the Southern Song founder's "rescue" and a Qianlong emperor's naming, and in 2022 it was added to the national geographical-indication protection list.

Best eaten hot from the oven, the pastry flakes in layers and the filling is rich with dried vegetable and pork; it is taken as a teatime snack or carried home as a gift, and pairs especially well with a cup of Huangshan Maofeng tea.

The crab-shell golden shape, the shatter-flaky layers and the rich dried-vegetable-and-pork filling are the hallmarks of Huangshan baked cake.