Changsha Pastries

Last updated 2026-11-10 — Changsha has a long history of pastry production, with written records dating back several hundred years. The city offers a wide variety of pastries rich in “Hunan” flavor. Here are a few examples: Changsha New Year Cake. Originating from glutinous rice rice cake, also known as “nuo zi.” During the Ming and Qing dynasties, confectionery workshops in Changsha towns improved upon the traditional rice cake-making techniques by grinding glutinous rice into fine powder, adding white sugar, kneading it with water into a rice dough, then shaping it into strips, squares, or rounds, and pressing in various fillings to make the New Year Cake. By the Republican era, nearly 40 workshops were making New Year Cakes during the Spring Festival, offering over 10 varieties such as Eight Treasures, Lotus Seed Paste, Lard, Osmanthus, Rose, and Date Paste. Among these, the ones made by Xinghua Village Confectionery Workshop were the most famous. Today, new varieties such as ham, sausage, candied fruit, and seafood have been added. The cakes are jade-white in color, soft and smooth, delicate and oily, tender and fragrant, sweet and glutinous with a refreshing taste. They can be deep-fried, grilled, or boiled in soup, making them suitable for all ages. Eating them during the Spring Festival has become a custom. Changsha Milk Cake. In 1910 (the second year of the Xuantong reign of the Qing Dynasty), Jiang Hengshou, founder of Jiang Yongshou Hall, created a fattening cake using high-quality rice flour, white sugar, and malnutrition sugar. It was fragrant, sweet, easy to digest, and had the added benefits of promoting growth and expelling parasites, making it a popular dairy product. Major food workshops in Changsha competed to imitate and produce it, and it became a staple in the pastry industry. The cake is square-shaped, snow-white in color, and delicate in texture, containing soybeans, milk powder, and rice flour. It has an aromatic scent, is highly nutritious, and is convenient to carry, transport, and store. When consumed, it is prepared with boiling water, making it easy to digest and absorb. Changsha Milk French Pastry. As the only fermented product among Hunan-style traditional pastries, it has a history of over 70 years. Initially called “fermented cake,” this uniquely flavored and new type of mass-market food was immediately favored by the public upon its debut. Its popularity was so great that shops sold out quickly and only offered it at night to attract more business, thereby boosting the nightlife economy. It became the “flagship” product of the Hunan pastry industry at the time. The main ingredients include refined flour, maltose, milk powder, sweet wine, sodium carbonate, and baking soda. The pastry is meticulously made through processes such as dough preparation, sweet wine fermentation, sugar curing, cutting, shaping, and baking. The cake is flat and round, with a milky-white surface and a brownish-yellow bottom. It is soft and fluffy on the palate, rich in milk aroma, mellow and lingering with wine fragrance, and deliciously sweet. (Changsha)