Plum Blossom Cake 梅花糕
Plum Blossom Cake is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Plum Blossom Cake (梅花糕) is a baked cake with a wheat-flour shell and a sweet red bean paste filling, sold hot from street stalls in Nanjing (南京). The head of the Fuzimiao Snack Association (夫子庙小吃协会) counts it among the traditional Qinhuai snacks (秦淮小吃).
How it is made
The cake is roughly cone-shaped: flour forms the shell around a red bean paste filling, and it is baked in a mould, which the Xinhua Daily Media Group (新华报业) describes as a hexagonal red-copper mould. The top is scattered with red and green candied shreds, pine nuts and sweet osmanthus (糖桂花).
According to China Tourism News (中国旅游报), the Nanjing version keeps the traditional method but adds tiny glutinous rice balls (小元宵), green and red candied fruit and pine nuts. It is made up in more than a dozen ways, with bean paste, jam, nuts and other additions, and baked on a purpose-made stove from a dozen or more ingredients, among them flour, bean paste and white sugar.
Flavour and texture
Straight from the stall, the shell is golden and slightly charred while the inside stays soft and sticky, and the bean paste is sweet without being cloying.
Where it comes from
China Tourism News dates Plum Blossom Cake to the Ming dynasty and says that by the Qing it had become a well-known snack across Jiangnan (江南), the region south of the lower Yangtze; it compares it with begonia cake (海棠糕). The paper chose it as Jiangsu's food for Cold Dew (寒露), one of the autumn solar terms, and calls it a well-known Nanjing snack. In the Fuzimiao (夫子庙) and Laomendong (老门东) areas it is one of the snacks popular with visitors from other parts of China, and the Fuzimiao Snack Association treats it as a traditional Qinhuai snack.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.