Decorated Steamed Buns 花饽饽
Decorated Steamed Buns is featured among the local specialties of Shandong.
Image notes
Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited.
Decorated Steamed Buns (花饽饽) is a shaped steamed-bun craft practised in Wendeng (文登), Weihai (威海). Its dough can become flowers, figures and elaborate birthday baskets. In Jiaodong (胶东), steaming buns for the New Year expresses a wish for life to rise and prosper.
Ingredients
Wendeng maker Lin Peng (林鹏) lists flour, peanut oil, eggs, yeast and white sugar among his ingredients. His work moves through ingredient preparation, kneading, shaping and proofing before steaming.
How it is made
Lin kneads firmly and quickly. Prolonged handling warms the dough and starts fermentation before shaping, making it harder to achieve a smooth surface. Learning to control proofing also helped him produce buns that split open as intended, called Kaikouxiao (开口笑), or open-mouthed smiles.
One birthday basket, made for an older person, took him five days. It used seven colours, each mixed, proofed and steamed separately, with peony, ginseng and fish decorations.
Where it comes from
CCTV’s 2023 profile, republished by Guangming Net, describes a craft with more than three hundred years of history. Lin learned kneading from his father, Lin Rongtao (林荣涛), who had made these buns for over thirty years.
After studying Chinese and Western pastry at Wendeng Technician College, Lin brought cartoon designs into the family’s work alongside traditional celebratory forms.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-26. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.