Often Used As Chinese New Year's Typical Cemilan, Here's How To Open Basket Cakes

Illustration (Ella Olsson/Pexels)

JAKARTA - Chinese New Year celebrations are closely related to various unique traditions. In addition to big meals, there is also a habit of eating snacks or desserts with family. This snack is usually in the form of cakes that are not only used as desserts but also as gifts and banquets for the ancestors during the worship of the spirit. One of them is basket cake.

This cake is made from a mixture of salt, glutinous rice, brown sugar, and wheat flour. Basketball cakes also symbolize hope for a better new year. Each Chinese New Year is the best-selling cake. Basket cake is called nian gao in Mandarin. The word nian means year and gao means cake. The sound sounds like a high word, so basket cakes are presented by arranged upwards.

How to serve basket cakes is actually a bit tricky because this cake has a sticky texture that blends with plastic wrappers. The owner of the Hockey basket cake business, Kim Hin Jauhari, shared how to serve basket cakes.

"So this basket cake is wrapped in plastic, yes, this sticky texture makes it difficult to remove the plastic," he said as quoted by ANTARA, February 7.

He said that plastic wrap of basket cakes can be removed using cooked water.

"We just need to take water, but the water is cooked, so it's just a matter of selling it all evenly. After that, we just need to release it," he said while practicing how to remove plastic from basket cakes.

Jauhari also said how to cut basket cakes, which are generally round, into neat pieces.

"Usually, if you want to be neat, we cut this cake with the help of someone else. One piece, the other one holds the part that you want to cut while a bit pulled," he said.

"The cutting tool is also after being used to cut it first, dip it into the water, then lap, and reuse it, and so on," he added.

That's tips for opening basket cake so that it can be separated from the wrapper. Hope it's useful!