When we were younger, our father would sometimes bring us to restaurants that allowed us to enjoy dishes apart from the usual fast food or local fare. This opened me, as well as my siblings, to be more curious to various cultures, especially when it comes to food. Once we see a new food establishment which offers something we haven’t had before, my sister and I would make a mental note to go there.
Besides sampling dishes from restaurants, I also try to cook them. Through social media and other food blogs, I discover different recipes that could help me put variety in the meals I cook for the family.
Recently, I was thinking of finding a way to get rid of the flours in the pantry. I finished off the bag of rice flour with my attempt to bake a Filipino rice cake called bibingka. (I still need to tweak the recipe for that.) Now, all that’s left is two cups of tapioca flour.
After research, I found a recipe for a Vietnamese Honeycomb Cake by RunawayRice.com. However, pandan isn’t readily available from where I am. (Or I’m just too lazy to look.) Also, I saw that I still have gula melaka from my recent trip to Malaysia. With that, I checked again online if I can omit pandan and found ricenflour.com’s Palm Sugar Vietnamese Honeycomb Cake (Bánh Bò) recipe as well as yummy4dummies.blogspot.com’s Vanilla Honeycomb Cake – Bánh Bò Nướng.
Combining parts of the three sets of recipes, I worked on my own recipe for the Vietnamese Honeycomb cake. And this is how I made mine:
Palm Sugar Honeycomb Cake
Ingredients:
2 cups tapioca flour
1/2 tsp salt
200 ml coconut cream
1.5 cups gula melaka (palm sugar) *
1 tsp vanilla extract
6 eggs
1 tbsp baking soda
2 tbsp lemon juice**
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease baking pan and cover the bottom with baking paper.
- Sift together the tapioca flour, baking soda and salt into a bowl. Set aside.
- Lightly beat the eggs and pass them through a sieve. Set aside.
- In a saucepan on high heat, mix coconut cream and gula melaka until the sugar is completely dissolved. Allow to cool down.
- Add the eggs and vanilla to the coconut cream and sugar mixture.
- Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Strain the batter through as sieve to make sure that there a no more lumps. Stir in the lemon juice before pouring it to the baking pan.
- Bake the cake for about 35-40 minutes on 350 degree F or until a toothpick comes out clean.
- Cut to 12 slices and serve.
*When I made this, I used only a cup of sugar. However it turned out plain which I didn’t mind. An extra cup could result to better flavored cake.
**The recipes I followed either use yeast or single active baking powder. But because I only have double acting in my pantry, I looked for the substitute with is baking powder and cream of tartar. I didn’t have the latter, so I used lemon juice as substitute. And I think it worked out fine.
Anyway, I am not trained in the culinary field. But besides art and writing, I love food as well. Lately I have been drawing mostly food illustrations. So I thought to myself, why not draw something that I have made.
If you enjoyed posts like this, feel free to like and comment. You can also give me a head’s up on some parts you wish to correct. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
The Eclectic Miss 