Pumpkin cakes

I was in Beijing for four days and used every meal time as an opportunity to sample as much street food as possible. Pancakes with egg and something unidentifiable and crispy were a favourite, as were baked sweet potatoes, spicy meat skewers, and steamed buns.

However, every day one food vendor would have queues at least four times longer that anybody else on the street. They were selling fresh pumpkin cakes, and must have had an introductory offer on, as each person in the queue would fill two whole plastic carrier bags. As their shop was small, two bags of cakes cleared them out completely, and the next customer would have to wait several minutes for a new batch to be taken from the oven and cooled long enough not to melt the bag. This whole system meant that one man was constantly mixing orange batter and pouring it into trays in a small oven, and one was removing the steaming cakes, cooling them, and dealing with customers. Behind the queue, probably unnoticed by most of the cake-lovers, was this vital team member, sitting on the kerb chopping bags of pumpkins. All day. In temperatures below zero.

I waited for 20 minutes in the queue on the first night and quickly realised that, not only would it take me at least an hour of my evening, but that I only really wanted one cake, and I wasn’t confident that my limited Mandarin would be able to communicate that. Whilst I would have happily eaten two bags of them, I thought it would probably be best for my health if I just moved on.