Guandu Baba (Sesame Cake)

Guandu baba is a baked wheat-flour cake from Kunming's Guandu old town, filled with ground sesame, peanut, and walnut sweetened with sugar, with a toasty crust and crumbly sweet center.

Its forebear was the sesame flatbread, already renowned in the Qing; originally a plain leavened wheat round, it gradually developed an array of fillings.

Baked and sold fresh, it is best eaten warm, in flavors such as sugar-sesame, perilla, rose red-bean, and peanut.

Crisp outside and soft within with a deep sesame fragrance, it is one of Guandu old town's most emblematic traditional pastries.