Viet World Kitchen

15 Minute Chocolate Cake Recipe

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.

A Near Strawberries and Cream Cake Wreck

I love to hear from young people who are getting into food and cooking. Last year, Kimberly, a Vietnamese-American high school junior, emailed me inquiring about a recipe for a Vietnamese/Asian-style cake. She wanted to prepare a mini-version of a strawberry and cream layer cake for her catering class as she had fond memories of it growing up when her mom bought the cakes at their local Asian market. She found the recipe on Viet World Kitchen and wrote:

It might be a little over exaggerated, but it was almost like fate finding your recipe! I've always like to bake. I never have the right equipment at home, but when I do it at school, I get a sense of enjoyment.

I hope your website is around for a while. I'm going to be off on my own soon. I want to still eat the many foods I grew up with. I know I'll be coming back to learn more about how to make our culture's cuisine.

I wrote back, encouraging Kimberly and asking for photos and a report back when she made the cake. Last Sunday, she emailed and sent the photo above. I love her stamina. Through all her travails, she successfully made the cake for Superbowl Sunday – and is going to repeat it for practice. Her adventure in making and using the strawberry and cream layer cake recipe is full of humor and grace:

Thai Sticky Rice with Coconut Cream a la Chez Pim

I live in Santa Cruz, a beach/hippie/arty/university town in Northern California that is very slowly shedding its mantra of “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.” Eleven years ago when my husband and I moved here from Santa Monica (Los Angeles), a long-time local told us that Santa Cruz is a cosmic place. Groovy, man . . . I don’t know if this quirky town offers a harmonic convergence or not, but life has put us here and I’ve met some wonderful, one-of-a-kind people, including Pim Techamuanvivit, the gourmet behind the Chezpim.com blog.

Pim and I get together on occasion for coffee and dinner out, but we have more fun when we cook together. Recently when Pim was over, I had a pot of purple rice prepared from a new rice blend I found at the Whole Foods down the street. I’d never seen the Alter-Eco fair trade rice before but it was an interesting combination of Thai rices: long-grain jasmine combined with short grain black. I made a pot of Alter Eco’s “purple jasmine” (photo below) earlier in the day to test it out, and the brilliant purple-stained result was more like a soft Thai black sticky rice, rather than regular long-grain rice. The flavor was delicately sweet and very much like com nep (Vietnamese sticky rice cooked in a pot like regular rice). A good canvas for Thai sticky rice and coconut milk?

How to Make Moon Cakes (Banh Trung Thu)

I used to assist my mother to make moon cakes for the annual Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, but a number of years ago, she ‘hung up her gloves’ and handed me her moon cake molds. I practiced and practiced until I got the technique and recipe down. The long and very detailed recipe is in my cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. It’s arguably one of the more difficult forms of pastry to master, and I skipped it last year due to my busy work schedule, much to my family’s chagrin since they now rely upon me for their supply since my mom retired.

Despite a hectic schedule this year, I went at it again, salting 2 dozen jumbo chicken eggs for 28 days. When the eggs finished their salty soak in our hall closet, it was time to make moon cakes. The kind my family enjoys is filled with a savory sweet filling of toasted nuts, sweet meats (citron and ginger), roasted meats, lime leaf, and rose petal liquor (mei kwei lu chiu/mai que lo). It’s complex cooking and takes up a whole day.  Here’s a gallery of a few of the components:

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But every time I do it, I remind myself of how I’m preserving a little bit of the past for the future. It’s old-school cooking and most people buy their own moon cakes. But I love my homemade ones as I made them from a recipe brought from Vietnam and tweaked in the United States. I may not be able to convince you to make your own. For posterity and your entertainment, I put together this video.  Enjoy and let me know if you savored some moon cake with tea tomorrow night!

Additional information:

Serious Eats: The Best Moon Cakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival (NYC sources) by Gordon Mark and Chichi Wang

Corn and Coconut Sweet Soup Recipe (Che Bap)

 

Even though corn is native to the Americas, cooks in Asia love to cook with corn. In my Vietnamese kitchen, I celebrate the summer bounty of sweet corn by stir-frying corn with chiles and dried shrimp, frying up batches of corn and coconut fritters and simmering pots of this creamy, risotto like sweet soup. Called chè (“cheh”), sweet soups can be hot, warm, or cold. They are sold as street food, served at restaurants, and made at home. In Vietnamese communities abroad, there are even cafeteria-like chè bars where you can point to various cooked ingredients and the clerk will combine them in a cup for you to eat in or takeaway. Look for chè at Vietnamese banh mi sandwich shops too; they’re typically sold in plastic see-through cups.

Vietnamese sweet soups are beloved snacks that aren’t cloyingly sweet. Last week on Twitter, Leah Crow (@cabeah) asked me to for this sweet soup, which she’d just enjoyed at a Vietnamese restaurant. I tweeted back a 140-character recipe but didn’t feel like the tweet was enough. With leftover ears of corn from Labor weekend, I made a batch of che bap (“cheh bahp”) and jotted down the recipe for Leah and you to use.

Fun with Condensed Milk: Vietnamese Yogurt Recipe

 

A national food magazine recently contacted me asking about Vietnamese yogurt. Was it something from the French? How do Vietnamese people eat it? How is Vietnamese yogurt made?  My mom used to make yogurt when we lived in Vietnam decades ago. It was the best, delicately tangy-sweet and creamy. When we arrived in America in the mid 1970s, I was astounded by the cloying fruit-at-the-bottom type of yogurt that was popular then. Plain yogurt at that time was the polar opposite – so sour it made me pucker and I didn’t touch it after the first try. Years later, French-style Yoplait got me eating yogurt again, but it gradually became sweeter over time and I gave it up.

It wasn’t until I went to China in 1992 that I tasted the yogurt of my childhood again. It was on a cold winter morning in the city of Kunming and purchased from a vendor who bicycled through town with a rack of warm yogurt to sell to passersby. The yogurt was made in tiny glass jars and my traveling companions and I sipped it from equally tiny straws, emptying out each jar before handing it back to the vendor, who then moved down the street to his next sale. The magazine's inquiry spurred me to research and figure out how to make Vietnamese-style yogurt to capture the taste from my youth.

Coconut and Pineapple Cake Recipe

Before Rite-Aid was Rite-Aid, it was called Thrifty’s and well-known for its remarkably inexpensive and good ice cream. During the hot summers, my siblings and I would go to Thrifty’s and each get 1 or 2 scoop cones for about 25 cents a scoop. It wasn’t Baskin and Robbins/31 Flavors but it was what we could afford. And, the selection was rather decent; my favorite Thrifty's flavor was mocha almond fudge. My mother never went with us as she was too busy working, but she’d put in an order for a half gallon of coconut pineapple ice cream, her favorite. We'd serve her some nightly, after dinner, after we'd all had our fresh fruit course (a Vietnamese dining tradition).

We didn’t know American ice cream from Italian gelato to sorbet but we knew that Thrifty’s was fabulous. Ice cream in Vietnam is a pricey affair and the texture is light, similar to that of Thrifty’s, so the drugstore ice cream treats were extra familiar. Nowadays, my mom, who’s turning 76 this year (I think), doesn’t eat tons of ice cream because of health concerns. But last week, as I was making up the strawberry and cream cake, I thought of coming up with something special for my mom. I looked to my friend Nancie McDermott’s terrific book, Southern Cakes (Chronicle Books, 2007) which has a number of coconut layer cake recipes from the American south, where such cakes are king. Nancie’s work and sensibilities (she’s an expert on Thai cooking, having been a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand) informed and inspired this coconut and pineapple cake recipe. Thanks, Nancie!

Mom’s birthday is in July and I’ll likely gift her this spectacular pineapple and coconut cake, coincidentally accented by spices used in beef pho noodle soup. Don’t worry, this isn’t a pho cake. It’s a lovely rich cake that you’ll swoon over.

Coconut Cake Recipe

In the Vietnamese repertoire, sponge cakes (banh bong lan) are the go-to cake because they require just a handful of low-cost ingredients. The delicate sponges are great for cakes such as strawberry and cream cake or a Christmas yule log cake. But when you want to pour on the love, a butter cake is the answer. It’s richer with more butter, yet light because of the fair amount of baking powder.  It’s also enriched by additional fat by way of milk, or in my case here, coconut milk, which gives the cake a tropical twist and good for the lactose intolerant. You can use this cake as a substitute for the sponge cake layers in the strawberry and cream cake. Layers of this cake are the foundation for my coconut and pineapple cake.