Venture deep into the heart of Shaxi old town and you might stumble across a century-old pastry store famous for serving up a traditional crabapple cake called haitanggao.

Gao is the Chinese word for cake, pudding or muffin, while haitang is the Chinese word for crabapple.

The owner of the family business is the third generation in his family and is the head chef. To make the delicious dessert, he uses fermented dough, bean paste, sugar, water melon seeds and preserved crabapples, cumquats, green plums and wax gourd rinds to make the cakes.

The majority of ingredients have a sweet flavor, which was meant to sate locals' desire for sweet food when the recipe was invented in the past.

While the process of making the dessert seems easy, the smallest error in timing or temperature control could be disastrous.

By Liu Sitong and edited by Jacob Hooson