Sun Cake 太阳饼
Sun Cake is featured among the local specialties of Taiwan.
Sun Cake (太阳饼) is a thin, roughly round pastry with a sweet filling that comes from Taichung (台中市) in central Taiwan. Its crust is flaky and breaks easily, and the filling is usually maltose. A 1992 Economic Daily News (经济日报) report called it Taichung's most representative speciality of recent decades, the box that locals take to friends elsewhere and that visitors carry home.
How it is made
The crust is kneaded with lard and is thin and flaky, and it wraps a filling of pure malt that is soft and sweet without cloying. Early sun cakes were made large and usually cut into pieces; smaller ones have appeared in recent years so they can be eaten whole. Chinese Wikipedia describes it as a tea snack to go with strong tea.
Where it comes from
The sun cake grew out of the maltose cake (麦芽饼) of Shekou (社口) in Taichung's Shengang District (神冈区), a pastry-making area since the late Qing dynasty. The Shengang District Office credits Kunpai (崑派), a century-old bakery founded by members of the Lin family of the Shekou Dafudi (社口大夫第) mansion, with a maltose cake that became its best-known product. Wei Qinghai (魏清海), known as Master A-Ming (阿明师), learned to make maltose cake at Kunpai and reworked it into the new form that was named the sun cake.
According to a 2024 United Daily News feature, a local gentleman surnamed Lin hired Wei to open the first sun cake shop, Taiyang Tang (太阳堂), at No. 23 on Ziyou Road (自由路); it has since moved. Wei went on to train more than a hundred sun cake bakers, who opened shops across Taichung, most under the Taiyang Tang name and each claiming to be the original. In 1998 four neighbouring shops at Nos. 21 to 27 on Section 2 of Ziyou Road were disputing which was the true original, while more than ten bakeries lined Zhongqing Road (中清路).
How the cake got its name is also uncertain. Chen Yonghui (陈永辉), owner of the Yifu Tang (一福堂) bakery, told the Economic Daily News in 1992 that Chiang Kai-shek's staff bought maltose cakes in Taichung on a trip to his Sun Moon Lake residence, and that Chiang liked them and had the railway sell them on trains. In his account the cakes were renamed after the sunflower emblem of the shop that sold them. The cake is still sold on trains and the high-speed rail.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.
Image credits & notes (1)
- A flaky Taichung sun cake (tai yang bing) broken open to show its maltose filling. · 太阳饼剖面，可见麦芽糖内馅，台中特产。Photo: Connie Ma (fickr user "ironypoisoning") · CC BY-SA 2.0 · taken 2013-11-22Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited. Thumbnails may show a cropped view.
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