Pancake master makes flowers bloom

Four years ago, thinking about all those colors, she got the idea of making pancake flowers.

"I loved to embroider flowers when I worked in an embroidery factory, so I wondered whether I could make these colorful pancakes into flowers," she said.

Her ideas were met with skepticism by her husband and fellow villagers at the beginning.

"I told her there was no way to work it out because the pancakes are too crispy. How can crispy things be made into flowers, which need to be twisted and folded," said Zhao Jian, Xu's husband.

But Xu was persistent.

"I worked on it for four days and made a little prototype, which wasn't good looking," Xu said.

To master the shape of pancake petals, Xu went to parks to study real flowers. She tried hundreds of times to discover the perfect moment to fold a pancake into a flower petal.

"We need to fold the pancake at a particular time when it is not too dry or wet," she said.

After more than three months of work, day and night, the shapes of the pancake flower petals became more consistent.

But the petals couldn't be stuck together with water, and if Xu used regular glue, the flowers would not be edible. She tried several materials and at last found her answer - honey and glutinous rice.

A splash of colorful pancake flowers in baskets greet customers in her store - yellow cherry blossoms, red roses, peonies in yellow,white, pink and purple. They're all amazingly realistic.