Last May, Hannah Pham hosted her mother and her three sisters in Los Angeles, where she was working with her husband, a comedian and actor. Ronny Chieng. She made them bun bo nung, the special occasion cake she loved growing up in Melbourne, Australia. The women who tasted Ms. Pham’s cake for the first time expressed doubts about whether the cake would be good. Although Ms. Pham’s mother does not bake cakes herself, she had a “bun bo lady” she would call to take orders.
After years of refining her recipe, Ms Pham became so confident in her cake that she served it to her elders. She said they were “very impressed”, their skeptical chatter turning to high praise, their expressions of delighted surprise captured on camera. Ms Pham first wanted to learn how to make this cake because she remembered the wonderful cakes the neighbourhood aunties would make for community potlucks.
Known in English as honeycomb cake, this cake has an inner pattern of holes that stretches out long like a yawn. Bun bo nuong is jade colored with pandan paste, which flavors the coconut milk batter. The bright green pandan leaves from which the paste is extracted give off fragrances such as jasmine and vanilla, along with soft herbs and roasted rice. A mixture of tapioca starch and rice flour gives a texture that is springy, sticky and soft.
Ms Pham loves it as a comfort food, but now she finds that anyone she serves it to, whether they have eaten it before or not, eats the soft sweet dish with delight.
“I just like to spread joy,” said Ms. Pham, who focuses both on comedy, television and film, her work as an executive producer with Mr. Chieng, and sharing good food. When she’s not on tour with her husband, she hosts supper clubs and takes this cake to parties. She only started cooking seriously in 2016, when she moved to New York. Missing the fine Vietnamese food in Melbourne, where her parents and older siblings moved as refugees in 1978 and where she was born, Ms. Pham taught herself to cook her favorite dishes and started a cooking blog,
In 2019, Ms. Pham posted a video and recipe for bánh bo nhung, but only perfected it in the last few years. To get a tall, even rise, she uses double-acting baking powder and doesn’t overbeat the eggs, which can cause the cake to break. Passing the ingredients through a sieve at every stage — mixing the flour, beating the eggs, stirring the finished mixture — ensures an airy, uniform honeycomb inside.
In addition to creating a foolproof batter, Ms. Pham added her own touch by creating a crispy outer crust. a bundt pan to have more of a browned shell in each bite, and to make the exterior even more caramelized, she reduced the amount of butter brushed onto the hot pan. Though her sizzling crisp shell looks different, Ms. Pham said, “my version doesn’t differ much from the classic.”
It may be even closer to earlier versions of Banh Bo Nuong. According to historian Vu Hong Lien, the author of this book “Rice and Baguette: A History of Food in Vietnam,” The term “bánh bo nung” was in an official Vietnamese dictionary in 1895, and the word bo was defined as “to creep,” which referred to how the dough creeps up the sides of the bowl. Bánh means cake and nung translates to “grill,” which usually refers to cooking over charcoal, which is the way most dishes were traditionally prepared.
Both traditional Vietnamese cakes and French gateaus, brought to the region by colonists, were cooked over charcoal in pans, pots or metal molds with metal lids that balanced the hot coals. That close, enveloping heat may have given the cakes a brown, crisp crust.
In the 1960s, when portable aluminum-box ovens were introduced to Vietnamese homes, some cooks began making the cake on their own. In the late 1970s, some Vietnamese refugees who moved to Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and the United States used Western-style ovens to bake the cake. Even before the change in kitchen equipment, there was no one way to make bánh bo nhung.
“The thing is that every cook has his or her own recipe and it’s just a little different from the original,” Dr. Lien said. “That’s why every village’s banh bo nuong is different from the other. That’s the best part. It’s really the cook’s recipe.”
Ms. Pham’s cake may not taste exactly like what her mother has been ordering for years, but it’s undoubtedly a great rendition – and it’s what her mother prefers now. It’s so delicious that Ms. Pham has been nicknamed the “Banh Bo Lady,” who makes things taste like home even when she’s half a world away.