EDMONTON - August in Edmonton is when we hit peak green onion cake.

Their summer season starts in July with the Works, the Taste of Edmonton and the Interstellar Rodeo, sails into the Heritage Festival, then hits a crescendo with the Folk Festival and the Fringe.

Small wonder. The crisp, grilled pancakes, filled with bright green onion tops and dipped into red-hot sambal oelek pepper sauce, are a perfect festive snack: portable, affordable finger-food, sweet and savoury at the same time.

They taste of Edmonton summer.

You don’t find green onion cakes in Calgary, Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. They are a local specialty. They were first introduced here in the 1980s by local restaurateur Siu To, through his restaurants the Happy Garden, the Mongolian Food Experience and the Genghis Grill. The cakes, also known as choan yo bang, were inspired by a popular street food from his native Tsingtao, China.

But the cake has transcended its creator. These days, Delta Foods, a local Chinese food manufacturer, sells its frozen green onion cakes to more than 50 local restaurants year round, as well as to supermarkets ranging from the IGA to the T & T.

You find green onion cakes at Edmonton farmers markets and in local food trucks, and on the menus of local Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino restaurants.

The Blue Plate Diner serves green onion cake pizza. The Underground makes a pulled pork sandwich served between green onion cakes. O’Byrnes Irish Pub has them on its appetizer menu, between the nachos and the chicken fingers. Block 1912 sells them as tapas. A local band, The Wisdom Teeth, has even written a green onion cake song.

Salma Kaida has bigger dreams. She wants to make it Edmonton’s official dish, the one the city serves up to visiting dignitaries, the way Calgary hands out white hats.

Kaida’s set up a green onion cake blog, greenonioncakes.com — while on Twitter, she tweets in the persona of a cheeky green onion cake. Last month, she started a green onion cake petition, looking for support for her dream to have it crowned Edmonton’s snack of snacks..

“It’s my pet project,” she says. “It’s my gift to the city.”

Kaida, 37, isn’t a chef or a food writer. She’s an accountant with Yardstick software. And she isn’t Chinese. Her family comes from Kenya and Tanzania. But she was born and raised in Edmonton. She grew up eating green onion cakes as a staple of her local diet. It took her years to realize how uniquely Edmontonian they were.

As an accountant and a techie, she has data to back her claim. She did a Google Trends analysis of all the online mentions of green onion cakes between 2005 and 2015. She was surprised to see that of the hundreds of mentions, all of them were from Canada. Then, she drilled down into the data, to find that 100 per cent of all references to green onion cakes in the past 10 years came from Edmonton.

Sure, she says, Edmontonians also eat donairs and perogies and pho and Tim Hortons doughnuts. But green onion cakes are ours, and ours alone.

“It’s not about whether you like green onion cakes. It’s about the food culture of a city and about our city identity. They’re already embedded in Edmonton culture.”