Aizi Flaky Pastry Cakes 矮子馅饼
Aizi Flaky Pastry Cakes is featured among the local specialties of Hubei.
Aizi Flaky Pastry Cakes (矮子馅饼) are small flaky cakes with sweet fillings from Jingmen (荆门) in Hubei. They look much like small Suzhou-style mooncakes, and in early 2025 the skill of making them was added to Hubei's seventh provincial intangible cultural heritage list as an extension item.
Flavour and texture
The crust breaks into many flaky layers, and the cakes are sweet without being cloying; the filling is dense and fine-textured. Traditional fillings are sweet, among them mung bean, brown sugar, osmanthus and sesame, and there are eight traditional flavours in all. Savoury versions with Sichuan pepper salt (椒盐) and pork floss were added later.
How it is made
At the original shop six or seven pastry cooks divide the work: rolling the pastry, mixing the filling, wrapping, coating the cakes with sesame seeds and cooking them on a griddle pan. The Jingmen media centre counts more than ten steps in all, and the smell of sugar, oil and sesame carries tens of metres down the street.
Where it comes from
In the villages of Zengji (曾集镇), a town in Shayang county (沙洋县) of Jingmen, nearly every household makes filled cakes. Pastry cook Li Yanbing (李延兵) was born there. His great-grandfather Li Zhengrui (李正锐) sold buns, steamed bread, fried dough sticks, layered flatbread and flaky cakes around Caimiao village (蔡庙村), and the Jingmen media centre traces the cakes' history to the late Qing. By the time the craft passed to Li Yanbing and his brother Li Yanfu (李延富) it was in its fourth generation.
In 1997 the brothers rented a shop on Gongshang Street (工商街) in Jingmen's Dongbao district (东宝区). They started with layered flatbread and sold flaky cakes on the side, but the cakes proved more popular, so they switched to them. Customers named the cakes after Li Yanbing's short build: aizi (矮子) means 'shorty'. The Hubei Department of Commerce describes Aizi Flaky Pastry Cakes as a Jingmen snack, dating from the 1980s, that has become part of local people's shared memory. The shop of just over 20 square metres on Gongshang Street remains the brand's head shop.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.