Last May, Hannah Pham hosted her mother and her mother’s three sisters in Los Angeles, where she was working with her husband, the comedian and actor Ronny Chieng. She baked them bánh bò nướng, the special occasion cake she loved growing up in Melbourne, Australia. The women, who were tasting Ms. Pham’s version for the first time, expressed their doubts about whether the cake would be any good. Even though Ms. Pham’s mother doesn’t make the cake herself, she had a “bánh bò lady” she called with orders.
After years of refining her recipe, Ms. Pham was confident enough in her cake to serve it to her elders. They were “so impressed,” she said, their skeptical clucking transformed to high praise, their expressions of happy surprise caught on camera. Ms. Pham first wanted to learn how to make this cake because she remembered the great ones neighborhood aunties made for community potlucks.
Known in English as honeycomb cake for its interior pattern of holes, stretched long like yawns, bánh bò nướng is tinted jade from pandan paste, which flavors the coconut milk batter. Glossy green pandan leaves, from which the paste is extracted, impart a scent that hovers like jasmine and vanilla with a grounding of soft herbs and toasted rice. The mix of tapioca starch and rice flour yields a texture that’s stretchy, sticky and soft.
Ms. Pham cherishes it as comfort food, but she now knows that anyone she gives it to, whether or not they’ve tried it before, experiences the squishy sweet as delight.
“I just like spreading joy,” Ms. Pham said, both of her work as an executive producer in comedy, television and film alongside Mr. Chieng, and of sharing good food. When she’s not touring with her husband, she hosts supper clubs and brings this cake to parties. She began cooking seriously only in 2016 when she moved to New York. Homesick for the excellent Vietnamese food in Melbourne, where her parents and older siblings had relocated as refugees in 1978 and where she was born, Ms. Pham taught herself her favorite dishes and started a cooking blog.
In 2019, Ms. Pham posted a video and recipe for bánh bò nướng, but perfected it only in the last few years. To achieve a tall, even rise, she uses double-acting baking powder and avoids overwhisking the eggs, which can cause the cake to collapse. Passing the ingredients through a sieve at every stage — mixing the flours, whisking the eggs, stirring the finished blend — ensures an airy, even honeycomb inside.
On top of figuring out a foolproof batter, Ms. Pham added her own touch by creating a crisp outer crust. She switched to a Bundt pan so there would be more of the browned shell in each bite and, to make the exterior even more caramelized, cut down on the amount of butter brushed over the heated pan. Even though her crackly crisp shell stands out, Ms. Pham said, “my version isn’t wildly different from the classic.”
It may even be closer to earlier iterations of bánh bò nướng. According to the historian Vu Hong Lien, the author of “Rice and Baguette: A History of Food in Vietnam,” the term “bánh bò nướng” was in an official Vietnamese dictionary in 1895, and the term bò was defined as “crawling” to describe how dough crawls up the sides of a bowl. Bánh means cake and nướng translates to “grill,” usually referring to cooking over charcoal, which was how most dishes were traditionally prepared.
Both traditional Vietnamese cakes and the French gateaux that colonizers brought to the region were cooked over charcoal in pans, pots or metal molds covered with metal lids that balanced hot coals. That close, enveloping heat may have given the cakes browned, crisp crusts.
In the 1960s, some cooks switched to baking cakes when portable aluminum-box ovens were introduced to homes in Vietnam. Beginning in the late 1970s, some Vietnamese refugees who moved to Australia, Britain, Canada, France and the United States used Western-style ovens for cakes. Even before the changes in kitchen appliances, there was never a single way to make bánh bò nướng.
“The thing is, that each cook has their own recipe and varies only slightly from the original,” Dr. Lien said. “That is why bánh bò nướng from each village is different from the next. That’s the best. It’s actually the cook’s recipe, really.”
Ms. Pham’s cake may not taste exactly like the ones her mother ordered for years, but it is indisputably an excellent rendition — and the one her mother now prefers. It’s so good, Ms. Pham has been anointed the “bánh bò lady,” creating tastes of home even when she’s half a world away.
