3 Wife cakes (老婆餅)
This is a traditional Cantonese pastry typically sent by the groom to a bride’s family after the engagement in order to “win them over.” It was lovingly named after the wife of a poor hawker in Guangdong who created the pastry and brought fortune to the family.
There are eight types of traditional bridal pastries, but the wife cake is by far the most symbolic. It’s a soft, round, and flakey cake filled with a mildly sweet, candied winter melon centre, and is certainly labour-intensive to make even by the professionals. The wife cake has not one but two doughs, one made with water and oil, and the other a simple oil dough. It used to be cut with lard, but the bakers managed to achieve the crumb without the use of the heavy ingredient, and so most commercial wife cake producers go without.
If you want the most authentic wife cake to taste before attempting it at home, head to Hang Heung in Yuen Long, which has been specialising in wife cakes since the 1980s.