A farmer family in Liuyang tells you how to make sweet potato cake

In a sunny day, Luo Suping and Li Guoying, her mother in law, are drying slices of sweet potato cakes in their front yard.

Wenguang Village locates on the north side of Liuyang and has seven thousand population. In a sunny day, Luo Suping and Li Guoying, her mother in law, are turning over slices of sweet potato cakes in their front yard. In here, sweet potato is a common produce, and there is a tradition of making sweet potato cake among farmers.

Luo Zhenxin tells us that his family had harvested a decent amount of sweet potatoes this year.

After sweet potatoes are washed, Chen Qinglian uses tool to remove their skins.

About six years ago, ladies in this village picked up the tradition of making sweet potato cake. At first, they just wanted to satisfy their children’s appetites. As their skill sharpened, sweet potato cake from Wenguang Village had become famous. This cake is a common snack that is often shared with guests, and it is considered as a sign of the locals’ hospitality.

Steamed sweet potatoes are pounded into paste, and sesames and sugars are added into it.

Luo Zhongyi spreads the paste evenly on a mold.

Sweet potatoes were harvested around hoar-frost falls, one of the 24 solar terms. Sweet potatoes that are planted in loose soils with sand grains have a proper balance of sugar and water, and one can easily taste the sweetness from this specie of sweet potato. After steamed sweet potatoes are mashed into paste, one can choose to mix it with sesames, orange skins and other spices. Thus, each household has a recipe of sweet potato cakes.

Sunshine can go through these thin slides of the paste on a mold.

Halfway sun-dried cakes are chopped into pieces.

In all procedures, turning pastes into cakes is the most difficult step. One need to use a particular wooden board and four wooden beams to make a rectangular mold. The paste spread on the mold must have a proper thickness. Otherwise, these slides of paste can be hard to dry or be broken easily. Also, moving the mold into a sun-drying area requires one’s attention to details.

In the end, farmers need to turn over these pieces, so they can be dried more completely.

“In our village, almost two hundred households know how to make sweet potato cake, and it has become a small industry in here.” After two days of drying, these cakes will be chopped into pieces. They will be given away to friends and relatives, and the remaining will be sold in the market.

Because species of sweet potatoes vary, there are various colors of sweet potato cake. Also tastes of them slightly differ.