Wife Cake 老婆饼
Wife Cake is featured among the local specialties of Hong Kong.
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Wife Cake (老婆饼), also called winter melon paste pastry (冬蓉酥), is a traditional pastry that originated in Guangdong (广东). It is most common in Guangdong and Hong Kong and can also be found in Taiwan.
Ingredients
A Wife Cake is round, with a flaky pastry shell around a filling of winter melon paste (冬瓜蓉) and cooked glutinous rice flour. Winter melon paste has almost no flavour on its own, so the sweetness of the filling comes from the sugar added to it. The other name, winter melon paste pastry, names those two parts: the melon filling and the flaky crust.
Where it comes from
Three stories are told about how the pastry got its name, and all three are legends. In the first, a well-off couple sold round cakes filled with winter melon paste; the wife made them, the husband sold them in the market, and when they sold well he named them after her. In the second, a woman sold herself into servitude because her sick father-in-law had no medicine, and her husband worked out a good cake and sold it until he had earned enough to buy her back; people afterwards called it wife cake.
The third story credits the Guangzhou (广州) restaurant Lin Heung (莲香楼). It says Lin Heung once hired a dim sum chef from Chaozhou (潮州), who brought the fried winter melon pastries (炸冬瓜角) his wife made at home in his home town to the restaurant's other chefs.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.