Festive market expansion
In 2006 the Taipei City Government launched the Pineapple Cake Cultural Festival, which has ended up playing an important role in garnering new business opportunities for pineapple cake manufacturers.
The idea for the festival came from the Taipei Bakery Association. Discovering that almost all tourists who come to Taipei purchase pineapple cakes, the TBA decided to vigorously promote the baked product.
The festival offered the participating cake manufacturers potential high-level exposure. Success could make them the talk of the town. The topic for the pineapple festival changes every year, so cake makers always have room for improvement. Last year the theme was flower fillings. This year it's rice fillings. Changing the theme stimulates innovation. As they concoct new flavors, the bakers create new business opportunities.
Konig Foods, the winner of the gold prize for creativity this year, used brown rice for its crust with a filling blended from purple glutinous rice, longan, sweet fermented rice and pineapple. The fragrance of the rice was highlighted, and the cakes were shaped like coins so as to suggest the idea of "ushering in wealth and prosperity."
It's not particularly hard to make pineapple cakes, but what's the secret to making the best tasting ones?
Pineapple cakes have at least a century of history in Taiwan. Early on, made from pineapple paste surrounded by a cake crust, the cakes were truly cake-shaped. But pineapple's sourness and stringy fiber (which easily gets caught in the teeth) gave them a rather coarse mouthfeel. Consequently, the makers began to try out other ingredients. They stumbled on winter melon, which has a water content of 90%.
The fiber of winter melon is finer. Makers first cook it and remove the water, before adding pineapple, sugar, malt and other ingredients. It turned out that simmering the mix of winter melon and pineapple for a long time created the filling that tasted best. It wasn't stringy, wouldn't stick to the teeth, and offered a glistening yellow color, with the fragrance and flavor of pineapple. Overall, it was a big improvement. According to the principles of traditional Chinese herbal medicine, winter melon has a "cool" nature. It helps to dispel heat and is good for the metabolism. Meanwhile, thirst-quenching pineapples promote production of saliva and help with digestion. They're a perfect match.
Nevertheless, with the passage of time, the filling used for pineapple cakes ended up becoming overwhelmingly winter melon with very little pineapple. That was a cause for concern. Via experimentation at the 2006 Pineapple Cake Festival, experts and master bakers were able to determine that pineapple should constitute at least 20% of the filling, and that the water content of the finished product should not exceed 12%. In that way the crust of a pineapple cake remains flaky, and the filling is sweet but not cloying, with a natural fruit aroma. The perfect match of filling and crust melts in the mouth.
In recent years pineapple cake manufacturers have been continually innovating with flavors. Their molds and packaging also reveal tremendous variation.