A Sweet Gift
for Mother's Day

Phoenix-eye cakes (fèngyǎn gāo) are one of Taiwan's quieter culinary heirlooms — small, almond-shaped cakes pressed from rice flour, sugar, and a long memory. The shape gets its name from the gentle curve of a phoenix's eye: a wish that whoever eats the cake will smile that same way.

For nearly a hundred years, Cheng Hsing-chen Bakery in Lukang has been one of the few places in Taiwan still making them by hand. When their master baker, Mr. Cheng Fu-wei, agreed to come to Huatan and teach our students himself, the school turned the visit into something larger: three weeks of classes, twelve homerooms, every child making one cake to take home to mom.

"It feels like playing with clay," one student told her teacher. Another said, "It's like building sandcastles, but you can eat them." That kind of language — the way kids translate a 100-year-old technique into something from their own world — was the whole point.

The lesson moved quickly between three subjects. In Mandarin class, students wrote about the experience. In Hokkien (Taiwanese) class, they learned to name each ingredient in their grandparents' language. And in the kitchen lab, they pressed the cakes themselves: rice flour, a careful weight of sugar, the small wooden mold.

It would have been easier to just hand each child a card to write "Happy Mother's Day." That's not what we did. We asked our students to slow down for three weeks, to learn a recipe older than their grandparents, and to give their moms something that took effort and time.

Mother's Day in Taiwan can quietly become a commercial event. In Huatan, we used it as an excuse to teach our children that culture is not a thing in a museum — it's something you can make in a classroom, on a Wednesday afternoon, with a wooden mold and your own two hands.