The Chickenless Chicken Biscuit - Kampar Kai Chai Peng

Locally, it's known as Kai Chai Peng (鸡仔饼). The characters literally mean "chicken young biscuit" or "little chicken biscuit", and its English name is "Kampar chicken biscuit". But I had no idea why they call it such, because it contains no chicken in it at all... not even chicken extract or essence or powder. Many recipes don't even have meat as an ingredient. 

Turns out, it is a continuation of the Phoenix Cookies story (read up about that here). A chef in Henan, Guangzhou apparently reinvented the phoenix cookies (which were already widely known then), and shaped them into chicks, hence the name little chicken. This version also had pork, but not chicken, and was still somewhat cake or pastry-like.

Then, chef in Kampar (in Perak, Malaysia) later modified it into this crispy disc form, and this is the Kampar version of that. 
This kai chai peng was an extremely thin disc.
How about the taste then? It's possibly the tastiest biscuit-type snack I have eaten. What I loved most about this version was how crispy it was, probably owing to its being so thin. I think its added crispiness was also due to a higher concentration of sugar, which helped to harden it upon heating, like the really sweet freshly-baked Famous Amos cookies, or else the crispy pastry topping that you find on top of the Hong Kong polo bun.

However, it didn't strike me as too sweet, probably because of the savoury and spicy tastes. I thought I tasted both garlic and shallots in it, although most of the recipes I found didn't have shallots as an ingredient. This one had shallot juice though.

There was also a strong toasted sesame taste. Perhaps the thinness of these together with the baking process, sugar and salt made the sesame flavour more pronounced.

I'm also not sure if they used pork in the one I tried, but I don't think so because I don't recall any meat-like ingredients. Nonetheless, some recipes include it. For instance, this one uses meat (but qualifies that it is optional), whereas this one doesn't at all.

Finally, what is common is that all the recipes I've seen feature a powder known by local Chinese as "five spice powder". It's basically a combination of ground star anise, cloves, Chinese cinnamon, Sichuan pepper and fennel seeds. And I think it's this spice combination that really gave this biscuit that punch.

Well, with all these ingredients, it's almost a meal... especially so if you decide to go with the recipe which uses the meat. Probably the only type of biscuit that I would describe as "hearty". 

It certainly had similarities in taste to the phoenix cookies from Hong Kong, but was overall a much better experience due to the texture and taste. 

 The ones I got came in little flat discs like these, about 4 inches in diameter... I suspect to match the diameter of the bottle it came in haha, as I've seen many variants in its size and shape. Some of them look more like a typical Western cookie, as you can see from a preliminary google search. (Hope the link works. If it doesn't, just click on google images and search "kai chai peng".) These were sold at a local patisserie in the traditional local snacks red-capped bottle as shown in the image here. You can also see how thin each piece was.
It came in a bottle typically used for local snacks, and the biscuit seemed to have been made to match the bottle in diameter.
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