Hong Kong-Style Waffle 格仔饼

Hong Kong-Style Waffle (格仔饼), literally 'grid cake', is one of Hong Kong's common street snacks: a round waffle scored into small squares, spread with butter, peanut butter and condensed milk and folded in half. It is sometimes also called gaap beng (夹饼, 'sandwich cake'), a name that refers to eating it wrapped around a filling. It differs from the European waffle: its squares are smaller than those of a Belgian waffle, and the round cake is usually divided into four quarters.

Ingredients

The batter is mostly egg, sugar, flour and evaporated milk, the same basic mix as another Hong Kong street snack, the egg waffle (鸡蛋仔, gai daan zai), and hawkers who sell one usually sell the other. The traditional waffle is golden and smells of egg; later versions colour and flavour the batter with chocolate powder, coffee, melon and other fruit flavours, or matcha powder.

How it is eaten

Once the waffle is baked, the filling goes on one side. The most traditional filling is butter, peanut butter and condensed milk with a little sugar; the round is then folded over into a half-moon and handed over in a paper bag. Other fillings include strawberry or blueberry jam, apple sauce, red bean paste and ice cream. Compared with the egg waffle it is softer, and it is usually eaten with a filling; the texture is light and the taste sweet.

Where it comes from

Hot cakes of this kind appeared in Hong Kong in the 1950s, mostly sold by roving street hawkers. Of these, the flat round kind is called gaap beng and the thick kind with a grid pattern is the grid waffle; both are eaten folded. They are said to derive from the Malaysian folded pancake apam balik (曼煎粿), and they are still standard fare at old-style snack shops.