Gambir Cake, a Typical Balinese Taffy

Not only rice wine and salted nuts favored by domestic tourists as typical souvenir of Bali, a number of snacks such as gambier snack is also responded positively by these circles. Gambier cake wrapped in leaves turns into a unique snack that can draw the intriguing interests of consumers to try. “Gambier Cake can be said as typical souvenir of Bali that is no less attractive than rice wine, and salted peanuts,” said Ayu, a manager of souvenir shop providing typical souvenirs of Bali located around Denpasar not long ago. Furthermore, she explained, as other regions in Indonesia, Bali also had a lot of typical and tempting snacks to enjoy. So far, she added, the current dominant market share for distinctive snack of Bali came from domestic tourists. Evidently, quite many tourists purchased gambier cakes, and this even increased when entering the holiday season. According to Rini, another souvenir seller, the gambier cake itself was wrapped with typical and attractive leaf as the one used for taffy. When eaten, people would taste a tenderly ground peanut sauce inside. She said it was very unique and delicious as the batter of black sticky rice processed into rubbery taffy cake was encapsulated by ground peanut. That’s why many domestic tourists such as from East Java, Jakarta and Bandung were always interested to purchase it as snack souvenirs when they paid a visit to Bali. Witari, another perpetrator of similar business, expressed the same opinion. She said that gambier confectionary had become one of the targets for a number of domestic tourists visiting Bali so far. During their visit to Bali they considered it incomplete before enjoying and bringing along gambier cake as souvenirs. Nevertheless, she admitted that the gambier cake business was inseparable from some problems. One of them occurred when the price of ingredients such as sticky rice increased.