My sisters and I took to baking western-style cakes soon after we got to America in 1975. There was so much butter, flour, and sugar that we could not resist beating up a batter to create cakes of all sizes and flavors. We used an old electric mixer that my dad picked up from a garage sale. We read recipes from French and American cookbooks, as well as magazines such as Good Housekeeping, which we’d get from the library.
We didn’t usually frost our cakes as that was time consuming. Plus, we saved making butter cream frostings and piping out fanciful decorations for my mom’s annual Christmas Yule Logs (Buche de Noel). We mostly ate our cakes straight, with some seasonal fruit on the side. Asians like the combination of fruit and cake. Witness the popular strawberry and cream layer cake.
I bake cakes whenever I want to re-taste my youth or cheer up. (I needed some cheering up this week, as you may have noticed.) My cakes may be a simple sponge cake (banh bong lan) that I whip up, or a quick chocolate cake like this one, a riff on a recipe I clipped from a 1995 Gourmet article by Laurie Colwin, one of the most soulful food writers.









