Layer cake is a must-to-eat in mid July in Hengshan town, Quzhou, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/qz96811.com]

Layer cake is a must-to-eat in mid July in Hengshan town, Quzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, according to Wu Zhujun, a renowned layer cake maker in Hengtang.

Wu said that layer cake or Qiancenggao means getting better over the year and they also used to offer sacrifice to the God of Grains for favorable weather and a good harvest.

Rice is the main ingredient of layer cakes.

Wu usually gets up at five o'clock to pick branches of moso bamboo, lotus and dry straws and she said that these materials are prepared to boil the water used to soak rice.

Wu put clean branches of moso bamboo, pistils of lotus and dry straws to boiling water and boil it into golden liquid. Then she stired some straw ashes into the liquid and filtered out the deposit.

Wu ground rice into powder after soaking them in the liquid for more than two hours and mixed some white sugar into the powder.

The last procedure is to steam the rice powder and is also the most difficult.

Cake makers need to watch the rice powder well steamed layer after layer and if one of the layers is not well steamed, the whole cake will be a failure. Wu put the first layer over the steamer to steam it for 15 minutes and then put the second layer over the first layer to steam them for another 15 minutes.

According to Wu, the layer cake usually has 10 layers and it means just the steaming procedure requires more than two hours.

After the layer cake was well steamed, Wu cut it into diamond shapes with cotton thread and she especially mentioned that the best way to each layer cake is to taste it layer by layer.