Chinese sponge cakes
It's a three-post day! What's going on?
I got sidetracked reading (more) about food, and specifically Chinese sponge cakes, which have been annoying me for several years now due to there being several different names for what appears to be the same thing.
So far on Wikipedia, i have found the following:
Song gao or 鬆糕, a Shanghainese sponge cake made from rice flour, usually with some azuki beans in it.
Fa gao or 發糕, a Hakka sponge cupcake made from rice flour.
Malay sponge cake or 馬拉糕, a Malaysian (?) sponge cake that is made from wheat flour and is especially popular in Hong Kong.
White sugar sponge cake or 白糖糕, another rice flour sponge from Foshan (Guangdong).
And elsewhere online (and on the streets?) i have found 黑糖糕 black sugar cake, which is yet another sort of sponge cake that might be from Okinawa or from Taiwan, or perhaps from both places but prepared slightly differently in each place.
So, it seems that there are many Chinese (or Asian) sponge cakes. I now think the one i got at Sam Po in Winnipeg was the Malay sponge cake. On the streets in China you would often get a 紅糖 brown sugar version of that one with a jujube on the top, which in the vernacular i am pretty sure most people just called a 紅糖發糕 brown sugar fa gao or 紅糖糕 brown sugar cake. The yellow ones (like in my last picture post) were very rare.
Either way, now that i have spent an hour reading about different sponge cakes, i want a sponge cake. Damnit.
I got sidetracked reading (more) about food, and specifically Chinese sponge cakes, which have been annoying me for several years now due to there being several different names for what appears to be the same thing.
So far on Wikipedia, i have found the following:
Song gao or 鬆糕, a Shanghainese sponge cake made from rice flour, usually with some azuki beans in it.
Fa gao or 發糕, a Hakka sponge cupcake made from rice flour.
Malay sponge cake or 馬拉糕, a Malaysian (?) sponge cake that is made from wheat flour and is especially popular in Hong Kong.
White sugar sponge cake or 白糖糕, another rice flour sponge from Foshan (Guangdong).
And elsewhere online (and on the streets?) i have found 黑糖糕 black sugar cake, which is yet another sort of sponge cake that might be from Okinawa or from Taiwan, or perhaps from both places but prepared slightly differently in each place.
So, it seems that there are many Chinese (or Asian) sponge cakes. I now think the one i got at Sam Po in Winnipeg was the Malay sponge cake. On the streets in China you would often get a 紅糖 brown sugar version of that one with a jujube on the top, which in the vernacular i am pretty sure most people just called a 紅糖發糕 brown sugar fa gao or 紅糖糕 brown sugar cake. The yellow ones (like in my last picture post) were very rare.
Either way, now that i have spent an hour reading about different sponge cakes, i want a sponge cake. Damnit.