Mugwort cake of the Tay people.

Ingredients include glutinous rice with large round grains, young mugwort leaves, sugar, black sesame, and beeswax.

The most important stage in making this cake is mixing ingredients together to form a beautiful and fragrant cake.

Upland glutinous rice is soaked overnight, then put in a pot to cook into sticky rice. Mugwort leaves are harvested and cleaned, then boiled with clear lime water (or ash water) to keep the green color. Ripe wormwood leaves are picked out, squeezed out all the water, chopped and fried in a cast iron pan.

The filling of the cake is black sesame. It is roasted, pounded and mixed with sugar.

Next, mix sticky rice with ripe wormwood leaves and pound it quickly until the cake is fragrant.

The molding stage shows the meticulousness and ingenuity of the bakers. Normally, they put a little beeswax on the palm of your hand, roll the thin crust out and put sesame paste into it, then mold it into a cake.

The cake is a blend of the fleshy taste of glutinous rice and sesame seeds, the sweetness of sugar, the slight bitterness of mugwort.

This is not only a delicious, nutritious cake but also contains many meanings. The sweet, bitter, and fleshy flavours of the cake symbolize the experiences in each person's life. The Tay people hope that when eating this cake, diners will easily overcome difficulties. On the first days of the new year, especially in families with children working away from home, parents often make this dish as a wish for their children to surmount obstacles in the future.