Guandu Griddle Cakes 官渡粑粑
Guandu Griddle Cakes is featured among the local specialties of Yunnan.
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Guandu Griddle Cakes (官渡粑粑) are round cakes associated with Guandu Old Town (官渡古镇) in Kunming (昆明). Xinhua’s 2020 visit to baker Yang Wu (杨武) documents a chewy dough, sweet fillings and cooking on a large, flat-bottomed pan.
How it is made
Yang mixes flour with warm water, alkali and salt, then leaves the dough to ferment. He divides it into fist-sized portions, wraps each around a spoonful of filling, rounds it and drops it onto the work surface to loosen the filling. The portions are rolled into discs. On the covered pan they cook over medium heat, with two turns before removal.
Ingredients
His fillings include sugar with sesame, rose-flavoured bean paste, and sugar with peanuts; plain cakes contain no filling. For the sesame version, the seeds are roasted until almost popping, ground and mixed with sugar, using their released oil to bring the filling together.
Flavour and texture
The freshly cut sesame cake combines the aroma of the seeds and the sweetness of sugar inside a chewy wrapper. The pan cooking gives its surface a golden colour and a light wheat aroma.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-30. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.