Hot on the heels of my "pudding" post, comes a similar one about cake. You know how at your office when it's somebody's birthday you all get cake. It's nice right? Well in Taiwan they will do the same thing. The problem is that "cake" in Taiwan is a completely different animal.
1. Cake can not be sweet. Taiwanese are told that they don't like sweet food. I'd have to agree with this, but it seems like more and more when Taiwanese are having more authentic desserts which of course are sweet, they are enjoying it.
2. The bread part of cake is chewy and squishy, not soft and moist.
3. Cake needs to have as many things in it as possible. The one above is quite reserved as it only has the gelatin "pudding" that I mentioned in a post a few days ago, and the purple stuff is a taro (kind of like a sweet potato) paste. Usually a cake must have 2 or three kinds of fruit in the layers of it as well. Speaking of which.
4. You can't see it in this picture, but all cakes have to have lots of pieces of fruit on top of them. It's better if those pieces of fruit have seeds in them so you have to worry about spitting them out while you are "enjoying" your cake.
Actually I should say that Taiwanese don't even like this type of cake. They too think it tastes horrible. However in Taiwanese point of view, a cake should be as "festive" as possible. So the more things it has going on, the more of a celebration it is. The taste is never a consideration, and this is why every office in Taiwan has months of old cake sitting in the fridge, cause nobody really eats it.
So next time you are at working and it's somebody's birthday, but you don't like that particular type of cake. Just remember that it could have been worse. Much, much worse.
